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Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

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Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#181

Post by jrochkind1 »

grenoire wrote: post #9

Christ on a bike, the state of Outlook on Windows is absolutely miserable. I knew it by experience when I started preparing HTML signatures for our company, but seeing the list makes me even sadder about the absolute state of incompetency caused by legacy systems in Microsoft. For those uninformed, Outlook on Windows effectively works on a terrible (and terribly old) implementation of HTML that was initially develope…

The samsung email client manages to support flexbox, along with pretty much every other client but AOL... and Outlook Windows.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#182

Post by jrochkind1 »

awestroke wrote: post #63

I just use premailer[1] to automatically convert the email html I write to outlook compatible html 0.1 gibberish [1]: https://github.com/peterbe/premailer

I don't think premailer provides any solution for figuring out what CSS works with outlook or altering CSS to work with outlook? It mostly just, as it says, "Turns CSS blocks into style attributes". That is a different problem/issue than OP is about.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#183

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

DocTomoe wrote: post #107
tiborsaas wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML in email helps readability, titles, lists, tables does help the recipient.

Nothing that cannot more elegantly be solved by using MarkDown ... ... or common sense.

Which e-mail client can render markdown?

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#184

Post by ivanhoe »

andrewkdinh wrote: post #119
ivanhoe wrote: post #116

I've spent a year of my life working on a front-end for visual composer tool for emails, and it was a horrible experience, time-travel back to IE6 era. I wish there was some tool like this back then, I'd probably keep it open in a tab all the time. We desperately need for someone to finally win this mail client war and some standardization to emerge.

> We desperately need for someone to finally win this mail client war and some standardization to emerge. Like all things, we need competition in this field. The Gmail web interface is already the most prevalent mail client. Because of this, Google can and has already started controlling the future of email. Just look at AMP for email. I agree with standardization, but not by having only one email client.

Competition is good, but competition creates segmentation, and with mail clients it's already far more crazy than browsers ever were. There are huge differences even between the different versions of the same client, especially across the different platforms - and people still use some really old Outlooks, so you can't ignore them. I've been doing web dev for a long time, ever since the IE4 (there was still NN back then), so I've been through all the craziness of the browser differences, but this is far worse as many clients are rewriting the html and limitations are super strict, you have to inline everything and use all kinds of css hacks.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#185

Post by slrz »

pembrook wrote: post #155
greyhair wrote: post #124

You send me anything other than plain text in an email, and I don't already have a source filter for your address, it gets sent to a folder that I might look at if I have the time some day.

So you don't buy things online or travel or do your taxes digitally? 99% of important transactional email I get is HTML. Kind of nice to have your boarding passes and two-factor authentication emails easily visible.

Most such mail tends to be not just HTML but rather multipart/alternative with an HTML but also a text/plain part.

Luckily, HTML only (or its bastard cousin: including a text/plain part that is horribly broken or just says "please enable HTML viewing") isn't seen that often around here.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#186

Post by megous »

jraph wrote: post #125
6d6b73 wrote: post #85

Why using plain text is better: - readable under any mail client and any text editor - smaller size files - safer - better accessibility and compatibility with screen readers

I don't get why plain text would be more accessible than a well-formed HTML email. A screen reader could say "this is a title", "this is a list item". In plain text, what do you get? "dash bla bla"? Though I hope screen reader are more intelligent than that, but it seems like a more complex problem than just using information given by a well-formed HTML text.

Give people HTML and most e-mails will be a complete undecipherable garbage on the markup level.

Basically almost everyone puts anything there so that they get some visually pleasing result, the markup semantics be damned.

One would think that lack of features of various mail clients would lead to using the lowest common denominator of some basic tags like b, i, a, hr, and maybe img.

Not so in reality.

One bank I've seen e-mails from even abuses invalid parsing of HTML comments, to produce whatever insane result someone somewhere dreamed up, like this:

  ...
Which is straight up invalid HTML, that sanitizing parsers like caja will reject. I had a fun of telling a client, that I will not purposefully break parsing algorithm of a HTML sanitizing parser just so that their customers can read mails from their bank.

(Experiences from writing a web mail client to be used in a real world.)

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#187

Post by bscphil »

gpvos wrote: post #12
ktpsns wrote: post #4

It would be really nice to have a small and simple markup language, say some markdown standard, to be the layouting language for E-Mails. No (external) images, just links, lists, headings, basic formatting. HTML E-Mails are a security nightmare, even if "only" CSS is "allowed" and JS/iframes/external images are not loaded.

Something like this? http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1896.txt

Markdown strikes me as a much improved version of exactly this, with the advantage that you don't have to have a supporting client to read the email, since it's simply plain text.

I want to see email clients start to support Markdown, so I can just send it to everyone.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#188

Post by eridius »

jefftk wrote: post #178
jandrese wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some bits of typical markdown syntax that I really don't like. Like pasting code requires you to add 4 spaces to the start of every line and an extra linefeed between each line. That's a lot of work and every time I do it I say "How is this better than ?" I've yet to see what I'd really like: preformatted text being surrounded by markers that make it easy to paste in, like so: Some regular text vvvvv Prefor…

The most common way to do this is with triple backticks: Some regular text ``` Preformatted text ``` While this isn't in the original spec ( https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#precode ) it's supported by GitHub, Stack Overflow, and most other places I find myself using a markdown flavor.

This syntax even made its way into CommonMark (https://spec.commonmark.org/0.29/#fenced-code-blocks)

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#189

Post by rypskar »

jlokier wrote: post #83
rypskar wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so sure about that, not downloading anything extra and only showing what is embedded in the email is one of the good things with using an email client. Using AMP email is back to thinking tracking pixels works in emails

If the content isn't inline, perhaps it's better to have the mail server fetch it when the email is received, so that the sender can't track whether you are reading it. This has been discussed before with regard to external links to images. I think that always made sense, but it makes even more sense to do this when the core content is external. Then fetching it would be just another part of the SMTP/HTTP transaction…

Should it do that for all emails sent to the domain, or only for valid addresses? If they only fetch for addresses in use this will open up for an easy way for spammers to verify if an address is in use or not

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#190

Post by ainar-g »

jolmg wrote: post #167
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #161

> Can I email plaintext ? > No results found. Why not suggest this feature to be added? It's worth sending a pull-request.

I wonder what content-types email clients support besides HTML and plaintext. Would any support mp3, mp4, markdown, org or odt? EDIT: Hmmm found this[1], and this[2]. They talk about using TROFF, TEX, Postscript, voice data, etc. I wonder if something like that ended up implemented somewhere. EDIT 2: I opened an issue[3]. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1049 [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc767 [3] https://githu…

E-Mails typeset in TeX sounds amazing! Right now you'd have to compile your TeX code to PDF/PS/DjVu and send that, which is far from perfect.
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