Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

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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.

<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p><font size=2 face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Arial">Hope you like <i></i><i>all</i> 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 <font size=2 face="Wingdings"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Wingdings">J</span></font></span></font></p>

The war is over, friend. Come on home.

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.

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.

> 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

Thanks for the laugh, that was well done.

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.

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