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Comment by kome | Hacker News Reader

> E-Mail before we lost the "text should be text and not goddamn HTML" war.

I am still fighting, and the war is not over.

You're pretty much the equivalent of the Japanese soldier who got stranded in the Philippines and kept fighting WWII until the 1970s.

HTML mail won. If you work in an office they will use either Exchange or Google Apps; Exchange's default configuration is a fuck you to text-based mail clients.

<o:p> </o:p>Hope you like all your email looking like this, because the only response you’ll get from your sysadmin should you decide to complain is a snippy remark along the lines of “try using an email client from this century”. Don’t worry, with enough practice you won’t even see the code — just blonde, brunette, redhead₀ J

The war is over, friend. Come on home.

You can just pipe your email through something that removes HTML.

Outlook seems to just ignore line breaks by default. But, there is probably a mime type to get around that.

HTML ignores line breaks. If you're using plain text, the format=flowed header is what ignores line breaks. Not all clients support it.

It's not just Outlook.

Exchange adds this mush to emails which were sent in plain text.

Thanks for the laugh, that was well done.

Perhaps, but why give up if you're not missing any benefit? I still pretty much can rely on something not being readable as plain text also not being worth my time.

That goes the same for websites that aren't readable in text-based or non-javascript browsers.

Failure to read emails from your boss or coworkers, irrespective of whether they've been turned into HTML hash, might get you disciplined or fired. So there's not no benefit.

I read my email in emacs, and use w3m to format the HTML from Exchange and Gmail users. Works really well. Does a good job with tables too.

I want to try using new emacs web browser (eww) instead but haven't had the time.

> The war is over, friend. Come on home.

Actually, remote Philippines are still fighting. Try sending your patches in HTML to some FOSS project's mailing list :)

I've even been at a place where Exchange/Outlook were used for that.

> You're pretty much the equivalent of the Japanese soldier who got stranded in the Philippines and kept fighting WWII until the 1970s.

Never hear about this—thanks for the entertaining research. For those interested, it might be this guy:

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

So am I... at some point for colleagues that were telling me that my mail looked bad because text (and they weren't using fixed width font), I was sending them text converted to html by a script, so it is contained in a <pre></pre> :->

Haha, imposing your plain text will on the HTMLers. I love it.

The main problem In the business world is Outlook. For some reason they decided to ignore line breaks in plain text by default, which makes plain text a broken mess

The main problem In the business world is Outlook. For some reason they decided to ignore line breaks in plain text by default, which makes plain text a broken mess

There's an option in Outlook to turn that "feature" off, but of course, nobody does.

It's a horrible, terrible default feature of Outlook.

It's also their problem. They send me HTML and I have to deal with that. I send them plain text, so they can do likewise.

That reason probably is good. Some mail clients wrap at 78 chars. Result is that the text doesn't flow. Larger window and text doesn't fill, smaller and you get staggered lines. For most Outlook users, it makes sense to convert this into something more readable.

I think there is an option to change its behaviour.

A lot of mail clients actually send both HTML and text (as they should), so if you configure your mail client to prefer text, almost all incoming mail will be presented to you as text. Now configure it to only send out plain text, and you are no longer part of the problem. :)

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