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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I am just really, really old at this point, but sending emails in plain text solves all these problems. I don't think I've ever received an HTML email that couldn't have been adequately represented in plain text and maybe an attached image if necessary.

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I'm sole responsible for acquisition on a startup and I solely (for now) use direct cold email (it is B2B, email sent to public adresses, so it is not spam).

I only use plain text emails. I don't even use email tracking so that hidden pixel doesn't trigger any annoying warning on the email client that ruins the experience.

Sending unsolicited email to public addresses in order to sell something is spam. Calling it 'cold email' to make it sound like a legitimate process does not change the fact you are spamming.

you may be right regarding definitions of spam, but as a user I treat relevant-and-targeted(-yet-unsolicited) emails very differently than I treat automated junk email.

I don't actually sell, as these business don't pay us anything. Rather they list they business on our website to their (and ours) value. Is it still spam? (honest question)

Edit: They are a business and have a "contact us" email on their website. Should I really not email them just because im not a customer, but a possible partner?

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative

Another way of phrasing your mother's advice: "What if everybody did X?"

If everybody visited one of this business website, the server wouldnt support. Yet, it is ethical that anyone visit. And if only people that really have an interest on visiting it do it. No problems.

I think the same for the email. If,everybody who can make a legitimate business proposal email them, no problem. And I apply the same ethics when I had my own company with a public email on my website (now im an employee and emails dont get to me)

This argument never holds up. Being a doctor or an engineer is almost always thought of as a good path. But what if everyone was a doctor or engineer? There'd be no one left to do basic tasks in life and the positions available for doctors and engineers would be so in demand that these people would work for very little.

Your point can be rephrased as, "What if everyone ignored the realities of the job market?" There's no danger that everyone will do that, so there's no need to use ethical or other philosophical arguments to discourage it.

On the other hand, spamming or otherwise misusing email to deliver your unsolicited "message" at everyone else's expense is a classic instance of the Tragedy of the Commons. There is no incentive for any individual actor to do the right thing. Kant's categorical imperative is one of several reasonable ways to think about it.

In some countries, business addresses aren't considered PII (private information). I, as a business, regularly get emails because of the Whois, as well as I receive letters which I dutifully send back to sender, but the law doesn't identify the latter as spam. Is it the case that emails to businesses aren't spam?

That's not true, by either the letter of the law or the spirit of it. I own a business, and I post my email publicly because I want people to contact me. Some of those people will be selling me things--I want that! It's true that I end up with a lot of spam as a result, and that sucks, but it's better than never receiving unsolicited business email.

Sending unsolicited email to consumers is, indeed, spam. B2B is different.

EDIT: CANSPAM (US) is a bit ambiguous on this point. (Helpful blog post: http://customer.io/blog/Send-email-without-unsubscribe-link-...) CASL, its Canadian equivalent (I'm Canadian) is very clear on this point, though--unsolicited B2B to a publicly posted email address is a-ok, as long as it's not automated.

From that post - a gem:

"Just to be clear, you’re not allowed to use Customer.io to send cold emails.."

Guess why :)

> Sending unsolicited email to public addresses in order to sell something is spam.

Only if it is sent in bulk.

No. Not by the spirit on not by the letter of the definition. Spam is bulk mail, or otherwise annoying a whole group of people. Sending a targeted e-mail to a single person (even if unsolicited, even if commercial) is not spam.

> it is B2B, email sent to public adresses, so it is not spam

Unsolicited commercial email is spam, regardless of whether it is B2B, and regardless of whether it is sent to "public addresses".

> (it is B2B, email sent to public adresses, so it is not spam

Depends in which country you are in but in most EU countries, that is still spam and hence subject to legal action.

Edit: why the downvote? Care to explain your point?

Yeah. Sadly, plain text email seems to be endangered species. But perhaps there is still hope, markdown and pals have made some inroads as all around useful document formats.

I know this is an extreme but I like this extreme.

When I say plain text, I mean plain-text. I mean not even markdown. Just plain text. The client can choose to make links clickable if they like.

Any formatted document should come as an attachment (I'd prefer PDF). I guess it should be an attachment I expect or I probably wouldn't open it. In any case, I don't like emails with tracking. It feels forced. If you really care, send delivery and read receipt requests but I doubt we do.

Markdown should stay where it belongs. It should convert into HTML in the server, not on my client.

I'm with you on this one, though I didn't realise we were extreme!

Plain text cuts all the cruft and I can reasonably expect emails I receive to largely look similar so I get good at extracting relevant information.

Every client I have, desktop and mobile, displays and sends in plain text only and I'm pleasantly surprised how infrequently this breaks anything completely and how often it exposes tracking links etc.

I'm fond of plaintext, but sometimes I do need to force a fixed-width font for a portion of the email.

Outlook formats plain text email with a square monospaced system font, making the rest of the world look retarded. The favour is reciporcal, because, as a gmail user, Outlook-sent emails often have this delightful pastel cyan rounded font, making them look like kindergarten artifacts.

How about RFC 1896 text/enriched?

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1896

While rich/styled text would be useful in many situations, I'd rather strive for simplicity. With Unicode, plain text is already complicated as it is and the diversity in email client software means that plain-text is probably our best bet. As far as I know, most office emails are pretty much like text messages anyways. Also, it is possible to leave stylistic/visual cues in a plain-text email such as Important (: Not really sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing to write like this...

If we must track users, perhaps we can just give them a link they can visit?

What do you think about using attachments for documents where formatting is essential?

Attachments are just a differently tagged MIME part.

I was not aware of that. Sorry. I just meant that if we want to send a document that should look exactly as we send it, perhaps we should consider sending a PDF document or something.

Something I found interesting in the Wikipedia MIME article is:

> Text in character sets other than ASCII

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME

If I so much as write க in Tamil, I rely on MIME. (Sorry if this is obvious to readers. I am not an email expert.) For others like me, the Wikipedia article on email spells it out:

> Originally an ASCII text-only communications medium, Internet email was extended by Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) to carry text in other character sets and multi-media content attachments. International email, with internationalized email addresses using UTF-8, has been standardized, but not yet widely adopted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email

Sorry for going off on a tangent. I appreciate your reply as I learned something new today. (:

For the first few years that I used gmail, I was set up to use plain text with the terminal theme. Why? It was the only theme that I could find that had a fixed width font, and I read enough emails with cut and pasted code that I wanted a fixed width font.

They took that option away from me in 2011. No, I don't care about a picture. All I wanted was fixed width font, and plain text. Yes, I could apply style sheets to read plain text, and they would eventually break them for me. I'm not bothering with an uphill battle to get it back. I'm just moving on.

Oh, and about rich text? If I happen to be cutting and pasting something that was bold over here, I usually don't want it bold in my email! In fact I've wanted that approximately 0 times in my life. And it is a very good approximation.

    If I happen to be cutting and pasting something that was
    bold over here, I usually don't want it bold in my email!

Ctrl+Shift+V

You've never received data that needed to be displayed as a table?

If plain text email was the end-all, then instant messenger and SMS would have killed email a long time ago.

If we're just displaying tables rather than interacting with them, that problem is solved.

    +----------------------------------+---------+------------------------+
    |               Col1               |  Col2   |          Col3          |
    +----------------------------------+---------+------------------------+
    | Value 1                          | Value 2 | 123                    |
    | Separate                         | cols    | with a tab or 4 spaces |
    | This is a row with only one cell |         |                        |
    +----------------------------------+---------+------------------------+

That only works if you can guarantee monospaced font rendering on the client.

It also looks ugly.

You cannot guarantee squat. Which is pretty much the gist of TFA, within a single vendor's various client interfaces to its own unified email system.

However, as I put on my True Scotsman hat and kilt, any true email client will present monospaced fonts, therefor those which fail to do so aren't real email tools.

This can't be reflowed to larger or smaller screen sizes.

It also doesn't necessarily work well for non-European languages.

In the old days instant messenger didn't work if the other party was offline, it didn't usually support more than 1 recipient, and it was just stuck in proprietary programs as it is these days. SMS is too short.

Data that couldn't be in an attached spreadsheet? Never.

> You've never received data that needed to be displayed as a table?

Actually not that often. If the formatting is critical to the email, don't write it in an email. Send me a PDF.

…except Gmail doesn't support plain-text email well either. They've been converting plaintext quotes to literal '>' characters for at least 3 years and counting:

https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/d/msg/gm...

I have a real estate app that sends me emails about new properties, with tables of data and embedded images. I couldn't do this with plain text email.

Attach a PDF?

It has hyperlinks. The whole purpose of the app is to be information dense so I can review as much data as possible. Works great with google inbox.

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