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Comment by _jal | Hacker News Reader

One way it works better is that there are people, like me, who have noticed that humans who want to talk to me (as opposed to wanting to sell me something) don't send HTML email.

So on my private personal account (not the ones I use for important things like banks), all HTML email is filtered directly to /dev/null.

That's caught exactly one personal email I'm aware of in ~15 years (I forget exactly when I added that to procmail). It might have hit others, but it is a far better false-positive rate than any other individual test.

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> One way it works better is that there are people, like me, who have noticed that humans who want to talk to me (as opposed to wanting to sell me something) don't send HTML email.

Except for legitimate automated emails. You know, like email confirmations when creating or updating an account, order confirmations, delivery notices, new login security notices, billing notifications, etc. are often sent in HTML email. If you literally pipe any HTML email to /dev/null, you will not be able to successfully register for any site that requires an email address, which is just about everything in today's world.

> (not the ones I use for important things like banks)

Why is why this works, if you have a seperate email account for people, you can then check the email account for companies once a day without missing anything. IMO, it's a great compromise allowing for connectivity without dealing with junk.

I disagree. Instead of partitioning with rules and filters, you're partitioning with accounts. It's less granular. It's not like the two accounts method is going to eliminate problems of false positives and false negatives. It just means you have two accounts to manage.

You both missed the trick. I could have been more clear in my description. It isn't two accounts to manage - it is (counted just now) 131 addresses. To the vast majority of those addresses, there is exactly one legitimate sender. I've started thinking of them as revokable leases on my inbox.

Setup for a new address is one line in my config management and takes less time to create than a filter in Gmail. There are other benefits, two of which being that it is easy to completely turn off someone who won't stop spamming, and it makes it obvious who is selling your address to whom.

Of course, you need a mail server and a domain, so it isn't for everyone. But this scheme has made it so much easier to control my email.

It's more granular as all companys that use my private email address are a bad actors.

I am essentially adding one bit of information to every email.

I think OP is talking about having a dedicated email for personal correspondence with people (and another for day to day usage with everything else).

Do the email client still default to TXT nowadays ?

Regardless how basic the email, it seems Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail always send them in HTML and I need to do something special to send it in plain text.

At work, the mail very often have some sort of minor formatting. A bold sentence here, a reply in a different colour there, or even simply links. Except for automated alert message from a system or another, the emails are basically always HTML.

Most of my friends and family to use Gmail; one uses Hotmail, and I have no trouble getting mail from any of them. I have no idea what Outlook does.

A lot of my work email indeed is HTML - people do love their red text and jokey memes. I'm talking about my personal mailbox that I use almost exclusively for talking to friends and family.

"Works on my machine."

In Thunderbird, you have to change it to plain text. I default to sending plain text, as a general rule. I usually read in plain text but currently have one system set to view in simple HTML. I forget why I changed that.

I assume HTML is fine so long as you limit the styling so it appears like a person wrote it

So nobody who wants to talk to you uses Gmail?

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