Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

caniemail.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 263 posts

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#91

Post by kiwijamo »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #82
StableAlkyne wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a completely valid opinion, and I prefer plaintext as well But at this point, it's pretty clear that most non-technical people prefer emails with fancy text and graphics. Personally, I'm just glad that email is a flexible enough medium to allow that. It's better than the alternative, where people moved to some closed, proprietary protocol behind like 20 patents that allows the same thing. Is there any other co…

My guess SMS (and similar) (by volume) are more frequent than email. Anecdotally, I only get 2-3 actual human emails per _year_. Rest is transactional spam.

That's you. My work emails receives 25-50 real human a day. I get less than that amount in SMS in an whole year on my work phone. Even my personal email is significantly more email than SMS. SMS is dying and replaced with messengers e.g. Teams, Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger etc.

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#92

Post by kiwijamo »

candiddevmike wrote: post #28
astrodust wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to say this, but can you imagine the hodge-podge of proprietary garbage we'd have to deal with if you couldn't email a simple file attachment to someone?

I think that hodge podge (OneDrive, Google drive, Dropbox, etc) is what most people already use. "Simple file attachments" are an oxymoron these days--size/extension restrictions, spam scores, not to mention the hell of iterating over email.

Depends on your use case. Sometimes I want to send a document and not have the receiver change it at their whims. E.g. quotes for jobs. Simple attachments are great for that. Also I find some people who aren't good with tech find attachments much easier to deal with. If I send a an attachment I am 100% confident the other person can open it. No so for sharing links etc.

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#93

Post by Eric_WVGG »

zzzkkk wrote: post #54
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #48

HTML email was such a tragic mistake. I think the whole mess could have been averted if Markdown had been invented about twenty years earlier.

Is this intended as sarcasm? Markdown renders to html, it's an authoring syntax that happens to be readable in it's "code" state. How would it solve email? The real issue is bespoke rendering engines instead of just using a rule of "everything the current browser can do, but no js".

Not in the slightest.

You can’t make elaborate layouts with Markdown. You can’t obfuscate text in images or make hidden links or inject JavaScript.

Just some basic text styling (headers, italics, bold type), and images. Everything necessary to make a well-formatted message — which is what email is supposed to be — instead of mailing a web page, in a medium that hasn’t been refined for quality and safety like modern HTML+CSS has.

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#94

Post by xcdzvyn »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #82
StableAlkyne wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a completely valid opinion, and I prefer plaintext as well But at this point, it's pretty clear that most non-technical people prefer emails with fancy text and graphics. Personally, I'm just glad that email is a flexible enough medium to allow that. It's better than the alternative, where people moved to some closed, proprietary protocol behind like 20 patents that allows the same thing. Is there any other co…

My guess SMS (and similar) (by volume) are more frequent than email. Anecdotally, I only get 2-3 actual human emails per _year_. Rest is transactional spam.

[dead]

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#95

Post by teddyh »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #48

HTML email was such a tragic mistake. I think the whole mess could have been averted if Markdown had been invented about twenty years earlier.

We did have text/enriched¹ since 1994, but everybody mostly ignored it.

1. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1896>

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#96

Post by arp242 »

legitster wrote: post #90
candiddevmike wrote: post #12

IMO, HTML was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content is the best content.

> Plain text content is the best content. Hard disagree. Things like bolding text, adding pictures, changing colors, etc are very important for the emails I send. So some amount of HTML is important to me.

Lack of ability to distinguish between pre-formatted text and regular prose alone makes it a complete non-starter for most who aren't reading monospaced text in a terminal. I don't really like reading monospace text for prose (many people don't), and using proportional fonts means things that are supposed to be aligned will break (and if you restrict yourself to text only, you'll find yourself aligning things on occasion for tables or other content).

I actually use plain text in FastMail because it's "better" than HTML (usually), but it's not good.

Ability to send text/markdown natively would be pretty brilliant.

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#97

Post by arp242 »

zzzkkk wrote: post #54
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #48

HTML email was such a tragic mistake. I think the whole mess could have been averted if Markdown had been invented about twenty years earlier.

Is this intended as sarcasm? Markdown renders to html, it's an authoring syntax that happens to be readable in it's "code" state. How would it solve email? The real issue is bespoke rendering engines instead of just using a rule of "everything the current browser can do, but no js".

Markdown gives most people >95% of the formatting they want to do.

It's easy and fairly intuitive to write (most of it, anyway).

It's easy to read in different formats and ways (HTML, plain text).

It doesn't add highly complex rendering issues. I've worked on two email clients in the last ten years, and the amount of weird HTML some send is just bonkers. Is in emails crazy? Yes. Do you need to deal with it? Also yes.

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#98

Post by arp242 »

barkbyte wrote: post #53
cypherpunks01 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, I didn't really fully understand that about SVG. Thanks for the info. From what I'm reading, it seems that from inside an SVG script, you can call out to javascript functions of the parent page? That seems kinda surprising, I'm sure there are security policies around it, but it means that there are potential security and performance risks/considerations around hosting and serving SVG files that I didn't realize…

The comment you’re replying to is misleading. SVG supports JavaScript but only if you load the SVG directly in your browser or inline it fully into the DOM. Using it as a normal image tag, by reference or with inlined data:, it’s inert and harmless from a JavaScript perspective. However, for a long time browsers were susceptible to denial of service attacks from maliciously crafted XML files, which SVG could exploit.…

Rendering HTML emails in the browser is rather tricky business, because HTML/CSS isolation mechanisms are non-existent or come with a lot of caveats. You want to make sure your layout doesn't get screwed because of some bonkers HTML/CSS but you also don't want the intended layout of the email to be completely screwed.

It's been a long while since I worked on this, but I was always very hesitant to make changes here, because we knew that our current thing worked for almost all customers, and you never knew what changes would break what.

We dogfooded our own client, and at some point a change I made broke the automated SIDN (which manages .nl TLD) emails. I forgot what exactly it was, but they did some really weird stuff. You can't just shrug and say "oh well, that's just crazy, fix your emails" because people do need those emails and getting these types of organisations to take action is like moving a mountain.

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#99

Post by croes »

shortformblog wrote: post #49
croes wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are valid reasons ro dislike HTML in emails https://lutrasecurity.com/en/articles/kobold-letters/ And if we have to chose between bold letters or less malware, we should choose the latter.

By this standard, we should go back to Lynx, because rich web browsers are way more dangerous than this extreme edge case that this guy invented because he doesn’t like HTML email.

Guess why browser sandboxes, TLS and HTTPS exist?

But the mail protocol is still the same.

Post reply on HN