Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

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> Send marked up messages that look good in both HTML and can be transformed into threaded comment strings in your client.

Sadly, that is impossible. The only mail client that does real HTML is Thunderbird (because under the hood it uses the fully featured Firefox engine).

Outlook even in modern versions still uses the horrifically broken Word HTML engine. Lotus Notes uses, depending on client configuration, either a OS-provided web view or its own stripped-down, worse-than-Word engine.

The webmailer options are even worse. Lotus Notes webmail passes most, though by far not all, HTML tags over to the client, which is pretty cool but you can't do anything with mediaqueries etc. as <style> tags get removed. GMail strips next to everything except images. GMX / Web.de are similar.

And mail support on mobile... don't get me started on this one. Android default mail does stuff differently than the Google Mail app; on iOS Mail at least responsiveness sorta works. Android Lotus Notes Mail is a mixture of "works" and "works not", probably decided by the current position of the moon or whatever.

And Javascript: doesn't work everywhere I tested except on Thunderbird, but there it invokes a prompt...

> The only mail client that does real HTML is Thunderbird (because under the hood it uses the fully featured Firefox engine).

And this is widely considered to be a bug and a source of insecurities, not a feature. The few remaining people I know who use Thunderbird use it in text-only mode in order to control its HTML-rendering tendencies.

Most people don't want a full-fledged browser in their email; it opens up too much attack surface, opportunities for "read receipts" and tracking cookies, etc.

That said, I think email is a good and underutilized tool, and it's unfortunate that more MUAs don't support features like digest handling properly. I think there's a pendulum that's going to swing away from public services like Facebook and back to direct-communication services (Snapchat might already be arguably a part of that) and email is already well-positioned there.

But forklifting the web and HTML into email clients is probably never going to happen.

Thunderbird by default doesn't load external web content, you have to explicitly allow it.

Very true.

I didn't appear to flesh out the details enough - the actual contents of the email is simply a transport mechanism - not the implementation of the client. All that needs to happen inside the email is that it looks like a good, well formatted email message when viewed with a regular email client (and interact properly when treated like and responded to as an email), with predictable content in predictable locations.

The app can then take the contents of that email and format it to appear like your standard social networking platform.

A social networking platform is simply a combination of 1-1, 1-many, and 1-all broadcasting of messages; a format which email is currently capable of.

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