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Comment by sramov | Hacker News Reader

Finally! We can now all use colors! And perky styles! And images!

Excellent! I am seriously considering just dropping all HTML email. Want your email to be received and read? Use the god damn plain text. You now, just write the email.

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Yeah, great idea. Formatting never adds information to plain text.

I wouldn't say _never_. But pretty close.

Hey, you expressed emphasis in plain text without using formatting!

No, just markup. Much easier to parse...

If you write well, removing the formatting won't delete information.

Formatting helps the least, those who use it most.

Some people can use it for good. Many other people just add headache, not useful emphasis.

I think the better curmudgeonly solution, then, is not to read email from people who use HTML without restraint, rather than not to read email from people who use HTML.

I've found being the asshole tech guy who pulls crap like that is a losing strategy.

Perhaps I'm just not good enough at being the asshole tech guy who pulls crap like this though.

I'm not suggesting either; I'm just proposing a less "asshole tech guy" solution than what the original commenter said: "I am seriously considering just dropping all HTML email."

I did this about a year ago and have not regretted it. I've also discovered which newsletters I don't need to be getting anymore (not that I've ever subscribed to many)--i.e., the ones that don't send plaintext versions.

In this vein, I wish Gmail would let me select the display font for editing and reading plain text emails. For a while, a Labs feature allowed one to "view in fixed width" a plain text email, but they discontinued even that.

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