The rest of the thread is rightfully criticizing the claim for its absurdity.
When one reply to the thread says people who need HTML emails have nothing useful to say in their mails [1], and another reply says that mentioning the last name of Bill Gates will get your mail dropped by spam filters [2], I'm not sure which side(s) the absurdity is on.
Is that true? Can anyone confirm?
Old fart gatekeeping at its finest. I have a bunch of patches in Linux, I run my own email server, and I know how to send proper plain text emails... but that kind of attitude makes me want to stay away from the OpenBSD community, if I ever have a reason to interact with it.
At least the LKML Torvalds shit-slinging tirades (which shouldn't happen, but still) are usually about code, not about meta stuff like this. This is just sad.
I've wasted an hour or so this year trying to figure out why an instance of Microsoft's sshd port of OpenSSH didn't behave as configured.
It took a while for me to realize that if you create/change the config files with Windows tooling, they will likely end up being encoded in UTF-16, which means that every second byte is a NUL character. If you have a C codebase expecting UTF-8 (like most UNIX-ish tools), that can lead to the config files just being ignored (as the tool likely hits a NUL before the first real character). In the case of sshd, you won't get any warnings or errors, either.
In Apple Mail you can "simply" open Preferences > Composing and set "Message Format" to "Plain Text". There is also the option for each message you write to Format > Make Plain Text
But you have to know that the option exists before you can go looking for it.