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chii

the only images i find are either from spammy adverts or tracking pixels. Normal people don't put images in emails.

As for attachments, you can open them in their native programs just fine.

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> Normal people don't put images in emails.

I am not sure of your definition of normal. ;-)

Part of my duties at work include help desk and maintenance of a few pieces of software. I get eMail with screen shots of error messages on a fairly regular basis.

(Personally, I have made my peace with HTML eMail, what I really dislike are those humongous email signatures with corporate logos and silly disclaimers that often dwarf the email body itself.)

Normal people absolutely put images in their emails.

Email clients like gmail/outlook put images in the content of the email (NOT an attachment) when you drag/drop files onto the window or when you copy/paste a picture inside the mail.

There was a time when this all went to attachment, that is not the case anymore.

Those images are effectively attachments that are referenced in the markup of the HTML. You can still view them just fine as attachment in mutt.

Sure it can be cumbersome if the various images are interleaved with commentary, but in my experience 99% of the time it's "Here are the pictures/documents you wanted" followed by a few attachments (inline or not).

There's a very, very small proportion of emails where HTML is actually mandatory to make sense of the contents. And for those I can just tell mutt to load the HTML in my web browser. I very seldom have to do that though, not enough to be a real nuisance.

Normal people then don't use email for creative work involving designs, mockups, sketches, etc. And yes, it kind of sucks to have the image opened out of its context in new window. Did you notice how HTML got successful by interleaving text and images?

> Normal people then don't use email for creative work involving designs, mockups, sketches, etc.

Sure they do, by attaching them.

Inline images are incredibly helpful when explaining things via email, which can be hard enough as it is. Imagine a textbook where all the diagrams were at the end of the chapter and you had to keep flicking between pages to refer to them. You have to imagine that as it doesn't exist, for some reason.

My colleague makes these images-with-commentary emails every week. For when I need to view those, I hit `H` in mutt, which opens the email in my web browser.

It's all quite painless really.

https://github.com/jezen/dotfiles/blob/master/.mutt/muttrc#L...

That does sound like a possible work-around, I might try moving to mutt again. But what about when you want to create one of those yourself? Or to reply inline to parts of theirs? How is that handled, do you write HTML?

One of the few reasons I have to mess around with NoMachine etc is for email, if I could get it in a terminal over ssh that'd be great. I did try a few years ago and after wasting a lot of time sorting the config, the lack of good reading experience for rich content emails was enough for me to dump the whole thing.

I've started playing with building a drop-in replacement for msmtp that converts markdown to a multipart email, but honestly I never actually need to create these kinds of emails, so that little project is on the back-burner.

The extra step and use of an external program is pretty inelegant, IMO, when there exist clients that will just show you the damn image in the mail window.

> Imagine a textbook where all the diagrams were at the end of the chapter and you had to keep flicking between pages to refer to them. You have to imagine that as it doesn't exist, for some reason.

I don't know if you are joking, but this was not uncommon for quite some time. It used to be that color printing was much more expensive than black and white. Text books often only had a few pages with illustrations and images in color. The color printed sheets were added last so they ended up exactly in the middle of the book.

I should have said:

> it doesn't exist anymore

Normal people don't put images in emails.

Normal people send me pictures in emails all the time. Very often it's a screenshot of something where they have drawn a circle around some part and written some variation of "this part is wrong" or "can you take a closer look at this".

>> Normal people don't put images in emails.

They shouldn't but they do. Almost every time someone sends me an image I think of a better place they could have put it. Attached to the ticket in our ticketing system, in our bug database, on our file server, etc

Sure they should. It depends on the tools available and the culture of the organization.

You don't get to dictate what features of email people should or shouldn't use.

Apple's Mail.app has a great feature that allows inline markup of images, which is a huge boon for interface discussions and tech support emails at my company.

I work in Service Department. As a regular part of my job, I put images in emails. I have to show people how to do things, and putting them as attachments and not inline would not be helpful.

At my old job, as an engineer, I also put images inline. I got emails all the time, or calls, asking why is this? The easiest way to show someone is in an email, with a screenshot.

Its not any different than an article in a newspaper or on a webpage with an inline image. It actually just works.

> Normal people don't put images in emails.

Despite my "Why Be Normal?" visor, I consider myself mostly normal. I send and receive email with inline images. Sometimes they're attached, which is usually annoying, unless they really aren't part of the narrative.

Normal people do it, because it's part of email.

"Normal People Do It" would make a great visor.

I suppose you have never worked together with a designer (but maybe those are not normal people).

>Normal people don't put images in emails

This is absolutely not true. Generally speaking, people whose experience leads them to think this are in weird isolated silos where highly technical folks are overrepresented.

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