Use plain-text email
useplaintext.email
useplaintext.email
Inline images are a huge, huge advantage, especially for internal business communications where an email may be the only real documentation of a problem and its solution. (Or at least the only documentation that can stand on its own -- the alternative is usually a PowerPoint deck with missing information that was only given in a one-time presentation.) Being able to add a graph or a table or a schematic or a photo is important for anyone who works with non-text data. I suspect some programmers may be unaware of how unusual it is to work entirely in text.
For example, my workplace no longer allows forwarding or IMAP access because of this, so I'm forced to use the sh*tty Outlook web client, which wastes untold numbers of minutes each day waiting on the damn thing to load something. Just now it wouldn't let me open a PDF in a native client, because I guess Microsoft is so obsessed with locking us into their ecosystem. Instead I had to save it to disk first then go to the file manager to load it. (Yo, MSFT, this is why people hate you.)
Strange... IMAP isn't the opposite of Outlook. And using IMAP-based email client keeping data locally is a better choice than to use webmail and to rely on email storage services of mail provider.
I believe that "Insert file" should insert a picture in the middle of the plain text, unlike "Attach file".
Tl;dr a multipart message can include an image with an inline 'content disposition'. It's intended that clients show it inline, but I suspect many don't. Like I said I haven't received any yet anyway, so it's probably not that consequential.
Another quirk I'm aware of, by implementing my client quite unforgivingly, is that many emails are structured with the attachments only 'tied' to one alternative, often the text/plain media type, so if you interpret the parsed tree structure of alternatives/attachments literally, the HTML-formatted message might refer to an attachment (I mean a PDF say, not an embedded image) that's actually only available on the plaintext version. Having never encountered this before, I'm pretty sure other clients (like Gmail, Fastmail) present all found attachments alongside whichever alternative is viewed, not taking the actual email too literally (as I presently do).
I think it's significant that this is written in the passive voice. Because written this way it has the semblance of officialness, of generalness. Whereas writing it in the active voice would reveal that the people doing the preferring are just the people who made this website, and this preference is just that: a preference.
I love HTML emails, because I use italics basically all the time in my writing, and underscores _just don't offer the same experience_.
Most of the time, italics aren't actually all that important though, and could easily be replaced with other linguistic features.
Edit, another thing is that the slashes is actually graphemic notation, not phonetic. There's no reason that you have to use something modeled off the IPA there, it's just common to do so. You could use any alphabet.
> "Plaintext Certified" graphic by Jens
I agree with you. Moreover, there's very little chance of any agreement about this in the foreseeable future. Those who believe that plaintext is God's gift to emailers will never change their views. They've held these views for many decades, so there's precious little chance of them doing so anytime soon.
We've seen this all before in many other endeavors both technical and nontechnical. Those who wrote with quills and fountain pens said that writing would go to the dogs if ballpoint pens became commonplace.
Fortran programmers resisted going from upper to lowercase (even now, this modern browser editor has a hangover from that long gone era as it automatically converted 'Fortran' to uppercase as was the once custom). As a longtime Fortran programmer, I'd suggest that if decisions about the human-computer interface were left to my kind then we'd likely still be using uppercase ASCII and telex machine would still be fashionable although perhaps considerably faster.
As is usually the case, there's often some truth to the arguments and promoters of a cause buttress them up with historical usage or precedent so as to strengthen their case. Making their arguments sound credible is an essential part of convincing neophytes and potential converts that they're right.
I'll briefly go back to the fountain pen example for a moment as it's analogous to this case and it's simple and easy to understand. There's considerable evidence that when the ballpoint pen overtook nibbed pens a little after WWII that writing did in some ways go to the dogs but the ballpoint only shares part of the blame, things were much more complex than it alone.
I have some authority in saying that as I'm a regular user of fountain pens and I own quite a number of them. Moreover, my writing is much less sloppy with them than when I use ballpoints not to mention the fact that I actually prefer writing with a nib as it provide much better haptic feedback than do ballpoints. There's little argument about that and the evidence is easily demonstrated by examining the writing of current users of said pens.
That said, that's only part of the story. There are also other reasons for why writing deteriorated at that time but it's off topic so I won't go into specifics. However, the relevant point with this example is that the promulgators of nibbed pens only promote their benefit - that of better handwriting. What they omit and never tell you about are the many disadvantages that nibbed pens have: ink gets everywhere, they're messy and time consuming to fill even when using ink cartridges - and probably the worst of all: take a fountain pen on a plane trip and the reduced air pressure forces ink out and all over one's shirt pocket. Right, there couldn't be a worse place for that to happen. And it happens frequently (I know from experience).
Back to plaintext email, it's what its promoters do not tell you about that's the real problem. The list is long but there's little point detailing them all here except to say that two stand out. If images and tables cannot be included as inline information then either they're likely to be lost or misplaced and second, that having to encode and transmit them separately by other means is both time consuming and error prone even if done within the same email client.
Moreover, plaintext doesn't have the range of glyphs and or the means of displaying them so that the presentation of the message information is simple and easy for the average nontechnical user to understand.
Try sending math equations in plaintext and you'll quickly get the 'picture'. Yes, it can be done but it's also messy, time consuming and error prone.
Things that are noticeable about the promoters of plaintext: they're often programmers or those who are experienced in abbreviating messages, they talk in acronyms and understand complex concepts even though their presentation may be poor, and thus they've little interest in presentation for the sake of clarity.
Unfortunately, these attributes are so often what ordinary users lack and it's specifically why big companies such as Microsoft use HTML email. Making software easier is supposedly part of their plan even if they often screw these processes up during deployment.
Like you, I like HTML email, however I'm still critical of it for the reason that at this point in its development it still does not have sufficiently well developed formatting to do what I want to do. For instance, no email client is yet capable of inserting math equations into email with ease.
My philosophy about email is very simple: a user should be able to insert into a message any type of information that can be printed in a book or drawn or scribbled on paper by hand and it should be transmissible to the recipient without any loss of formatting. QED!
Right, we aren't there yet and this view is the antithesis of the plaintext philosophy. Nevertheless, that's what eventually will happen whether the plaintext-ers like it or not.
A final point: you'll note that plaintext-ers are always whingeing about users who cut-and-paste from word processors and web pages and that the info gets garbled in the process; well, they've a valid point.
However, this has nothing to do with the issue that email presentation and formatting should be as easy and as versatile as is possible. The fact that most email clients are woefully bad - in fact outright disgraceful - is a separate issue altogether.
Moreover, I'd suggest many mail clients would be in a much better state than they are at present if the plaintext-ers weren't sabotaging their development. After all, many of them have actually developed mail packages and they give little or no priority to HTML messages not to mention their fervent propaganda in favor of plaintext email.
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Edit: this plaintext email story is not the only one to appear in the last day or so on HN about email content. The other, however, took a diametrically opposing view to this story as it discusses various ways of maintaining accurate CSS formatting in emails - now that's one hell of a jump from plaintext messages.
That story only demonstrates that the gap between the plaintext-ers and those who want advanced HTML formatting is as wide as ever. After reading it you'll likely realize that ultimately plaintext-ers will have very little chance of winning against strong commercial pressures that want better formatting within email.
The link below is to my comment and deals with many of the issues mentioned herein. Therein, I use Thunderbird to demonstrate some of the many problems with current email clients.
Incidentally, as that story was earlier I wouldn't be a bt surprised if this plaintext one was posted as a countermeasure to the former.
We have tried to send you this email as HTML (pictures and words) but it wasn't possible. In order for you to see what we had hoped to show you please click here to view online in your browser:
<long-url-with-lots-of-tracking-guids>
Ironically in this case the HTML message they so dearly hoped I'd see is only a notification that there is an update and I should go to the website and login to see what the update is. To top it off, the only picture in the message is the company's logo.
When that happens I then have to copy the raw encoded "text" into some shady website $email-html-specific-content-type to text converter just to get the html in it's natural character set to manually find and copy the <long-url-with-lots-of-tracking-guids>.
It's just the confluence of Quoted-printable transfer encoding and the tendency for HTML emails to embed links split up and in non-href and other tags that end up not getting rendered on my thunderbird fork in text mode which means I have to view source and deal with the Quoted-printable URLs.
To make maters worse, there's now AMP for email, https://amp.dev/about/email/
Then they top post their entire email to a 257 email chain, so you have to do a kind of inverted scavenger hunt in order to figure out what they're talking about, none of which is improved or aided by the company logo, special font, or image links to nine different social media accounts.
And I haven't even gotten to grandma's love of emojis to convey her appreciation of your ribald joke about cookies.
Email is a tool, and like all tools, it can be grossly misused and abused.
2. The bloat/ugliness argument could also be applied to websites, but no one is out there advocating for plain text websites.
In any event, email and Web sites are completely different things. Different communication mediums require different communication styles. Advocating for a certain style on one does not mean you have to also advocate for the same on another. The question would be "does rich-formatted text substantially add to the medium of email," and I think the clear answer to that is "not really."
An example of a good use of rich-formatted text contributing to an email would be coloring responses to questions. I see this one a lot, e.g. "my responses are in RED." We had the > quote style for this already, which was pretty good until an email thread started to get really, really deeply nested. In plain-text, at some point, somebody would have to edit the quotes down. There was a marginal advantage to having styled text to clear this up. Was this advantage enough to have to suffer through the majority of emails where this was not required and the formatted text was rife with extraneous or useless widgets?
I beg to disagree. Plain text doesn't offer any support for embedded metadata, which are vital for screen readers. With just plain text you have no way to tell apart a header, footer or aside from the main content.
> Web devs usually do a lot of work to make a Web site accessible.
Yes, they do a lot of work. Mostly using semantic HTML and embedding text descriptions in data attributes.
This should go without saying: Plain text is less accessible than well written, semantic HTML, not more.
The gemini folks (gemini.circumlunar.space/) basically are, but I think it's a similarly niche / reactionary take.
This is a client-side issue, IMO. If someone doesn't like HTML, simply don't enable parsing of it and view the source.
> "But if plaintext is so good, why is this page written in HTML?"
> This is a reference document, not an email, you twit.
They could have made this site plain text and followed all of their own guidelines, but they didn't. Instead, they wanted to make the site look prettier to get their message across with additional formatting plain text can't handle. They're reducing accessibility and increasing security issues just for their own superfluous desires.
https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text/
https://jaytaylor.com/html2text
It takes HTML as input and generates markdown-esque plaintext, with the main focus being to make the plaintext version easy and pleasant to read for human beings. Then using MIME types*, you transmit both the rich html version alongside the generated text/plain version.
This is cool because it makes it easy to respect both rich clients (like Gmail et. al.) as well as command-line or other clients which work better with simple text.
Hope this helps folks have the best of both worlds! :) cheers
* n.b. To ensure this works properly, be sure to use the right MIME headers:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3902455/mail-multipart-a...
Now whatever the receiver decides they want to view they can.
Large signatures don't communicate anything useful to me that isn't in the email header. The phone number can be nice, but you didn't need html for that. Your brand identity that takes up half a page (more since I keep email in a small window to the side of my monitor) does nothing other than obscure the content of the email. Trust me, sending me an intensely formatted email with lots of pictures does not increase the likelihood of me doing business with you.
99% of email I receive contains < 1 paragraph of useful information. I would prefer if people just sent that. Then I can read it quickly (since it uses the same font as everything else, not that faux handwriting font you found somewhere and thought looked great) and respond quickly and helpfully, which I hope was the purpose you sent the email in the first place.
There's probably a 1% where a nicely formatted document with graphs and images and headers are helpful. But you can just attach a document to the email if you're going to put that kind of effort it.
The end result is that they almost always get trashed unread. I might actually be missing out on a useful new product or a great deal but I'm not going to bother with the extra clicks and unknown risks because marketing wanted to make it pretty over making it accessible.
Unlike email.
Some people need to understand there are more use cases to email than mailing lists and that the 90s aren't coming back.
In short, I completely agree with you.
On the other hand, humanity would probably be better served by moving toward semantic representation instead of fiddling in the deck over txt vs html.
Whoever said the column width has to be 80 chars everywhere?
There is nothing special about a smart phone that should prevent the display of the most basic format there is. The problem is with the email client...
There was a long-ish thread on the mutt mailing list recently, which open my narrow mind a bit. Html formatted mails are not a question of personal preference. Exchanging Mails with other people also includes supporting their way of dealing with mails.
So since a long time I convert text/html to plain text in order to be able to read that. Since recently, I also send a simple multipart mail with both text/plain and text/html. The conversion script it a simple 10 lines python markdown script. All done and all happy.
In particular, it makes my mail more readable on any kind of display; e.g. narrow phone or wide monitor.
I'm still happy to converse only via text/plain, like here.
As for the folks who go on about branded marketing emails… gawd, it's like hearing someone say "actually I wish I got more, better junk mail"
It's a pity that something like Markdown didn't exist back in the nineties. If we could just have had some really basic formatting options (bold, italics, and a couple images are not unreasonable requests), the whole scourge of HTML email might have been sidestepped.
I hear ya on Markdown.
any search result for “considered harmful”
Whaaaaat? How about a more honest version...
> HTML emails are mainly used BY LITERALLY EVERYONE
The effort should be fought in adding a newer way of doing HTML email that is better, and finally kill that damn IE 6-based renderer used by Outlook. Curse that thing.
I default to plain-text 99% of the time. In my corporate world I am FORCED to embed excel tables, colour-coded replies (Bob's replies are in RED, Alice's replies are in GREEN) [fuck the colour blind].
And I hate it. So it's only those emails that get it. I have been forced to conform. Outlook is still configured for plain-text email, and bitches about it whenever possible.
Everywhere else, plain-text only. Resistance is futile.
Some clients don't support anything but inline styles, others support style tags. Some support media queries, some don't. Some support custom fonts / web fonts, some don't. Gmail in browser behaves differently from Gmail android client behaves differently from Gmail iOS client, etc. There's an absolutely infuriating dark mode on Outlook that randomly swaps certain color hues and as far as I can tell there's no way to detect or show different styles for it, you just have to make your design stand up to certain colors being swapped (don't use any logo or other image that can't stand clearly against both black and white backgrounds). I learned a lot about a bunch of extremely legacy HTML and CSS rules that would never be used in a modern website but were basically required for a semi-responsive email.
I won't ever do it again- if I need a custom styled email, I'll use someone else's template or email template builder service.
You should actually try this if you use plain text email - email yourself and try and read it in a normal mail client (gmail, outlook, etc) on a phone. You'll need to scroll horizontally to read the message.
Now read it on a normal desktop email client. You'll see a skinny tall column of text in a tiny font.
Now reply to a normal html email thread and view it in a normal mail client. Congrats - you've just broken the formatting for everyone* on the thread. Nobody wants you see those >> things all over the place.
I don't know why this idea persists. Nobody wants to read a book in a fixed width font, nobody wants to read a web page in a fixed width font that doesn't adapt to your viewport size, etc. Hell, programmers even want colors and fancy formatting in their source code.
Plain text email is the ham radio of the internet. If you are an email hobbiest and you enjoy sending and receiving plain text emails to other hobbiests more power to you. But don't try and setup a meeting at work over your ham radio. You'll just look dumb.
OK, I just did. I didn't have any of those issues at all. Perhaps it depends on the exact mail client you use?
Which also works in Facebook Messenger and in WhatsApp, which very few people seem to know.
OK, here, I made you a screenshot.
I'd be perfectly happy with Markdown or likely RFC 1896 as someone else mentioned.
https://info.webusability.co.uk/blog/what-is-the-law-on-acce...
Formatted email is especially difficult for blind users, whether they are using a screen reader or a Braille display.
Formatting can't be read aloud via text-to-speech if a sighted person is using it on a smartwatch or similar.
Formatting does not survive automatic translation. I live in a country where I do not speak the local language and I rely very heavily on machine translation; in fact in the last 5min I have just paid my gas bill using Google Translate to understand the email I was sent, and then again to navigate the gas supplier's website.
Formatting does not display in on-screen notification messages, and it may not survive being forwarded, read in certain clients, etc.
If you find you are relying on it, then you should improve your writing skills, because you are unwittingly excluding people and some will receive damaged versions of your emails which they can't understand correctly.
Is this universally true? I'm not an accessibility expert but from working on a couple 508 projects it seems that formatting such as headings improves accessibility and makes navigation easier.
> If you find you are relying on it, then you should improve your writing skills
Some of the content I email includes screenshots of issues, photographs from studies, iconography, and data visualizations. Beyond ensuring that I include accompanying/alternate text I accept that these will not be accessible.
Other content includes hierarchical lists and snippets of tabular data. While these can be creatively emulated using plain text I find that people doing so typically resort to a jarring sort of ASCII-art approach that ends up being even less accessible than just using the proper semantic tags or markdown.
More broadly I find it disappointing that we ended up in this situation where technical constraints dictate what is good writing. Italics has been part of writing for hundreds of years and now it's relegated to "markup" because of decisions some computer engineers made sixty years ago. Can you imagine if the ASCII standard had stuck with the initial all-caps specification and relegated lowercase letters to be markup? Would we now be arguing that people who don't write in all caps "should improve [their] writing skills"?
Personally I prefer structured text to either plain or formatted text. Formats like markdown aren't perfect but they basically provide what I need so it's disappointing that email clients force us to choose between the extremes of plain text and HTML.
[1]: https://freron.com/
I'm using Markdown for email preview, local search, etc. In the future I think about experimenting with voice mail. Something like "Read all important emails", which will skip all marketing, updates, or forums. Also I have an experimental feature email to be viewed always in Markdown.
For €62, i wonder how often a new version arrives / i'll have to buy/upgrade again...
The reality is that HTML email's too convenient to go away at this point. It fills enough niches both in people's corporate and personal lives to ever truly be undone, and having so many of the recommended clients being TUI-based (and emacs-based, apparently) shows a particular tone-deafness since TUI mail clients will almost certainly never be widely-adopted ever again, even by people who spend lots of time in a shell. Add on to that, that TUI mail clients will almost invariably render monospace fonts, which aren't great for reading things other than code.
If plain text was more than acceptable to get the point across, this page wouldn't use HTML. Instead, they have an inline image, they have multiple font weights, anchor tags, inline styles, chosen fonts, changes in colors, hyperlinks, bulleted lists, etc.
They argue you do not need HTML formatting to get a point across, but then rely on HTML formatting to get their point across. Why did they bother using bulleted lists? Why did they use links and anchor tags instead of just having the URL written out in plain text? Why would they bother embedding an image into their page instead of just giving us the URL and letting us choose to fetch it if we wanted to after reading the message? Maybe because its better to look at and read using HTML formatting instead of just plain text.
Maybe I want a bulleted list in an email. Maybe I would like to have a link instead of just having a giant URL as plain text in my email. Maybe I'd like to have the image I'm talking about in my email in the email instead of being some other resource for the person to fetch. Its condescending for them to say "You should never use bulleted lists, here's a bulleted list of reasons why you shouldn't use bulleted lists!" Its condescending for them to say don't use links when they use loads of links. If its better to just put the full URL out there plainly, then they should have done it. They didn't because its not better, its nice using links.
If the alternative is perfectly acceptable, why didn't they just use the alternative? They didn't, because the alternative isn't perfectly acceptable all the time. There's a good reason to mark up your writing.
Its condescending for them to say:
> Rich text isn't that great, anyway
in a rich-text document. If rich text isn't that great, why are they using it? Because the alternative isn't that great!
proceeds to write a nearly 3,000 word document with rich formatting an inline images...
Why should you bother using markup on a webpage? How do those reasons never apply to sending an email?
I've found it to be rather helpful in determining which emails to delete immediately. If it's HTML, it's probably commercial in nature, and if I can't easily read the contents in the HTML source, then it's certainly an email that isn't worth reading at all.
That said, email in general would be greatly improved if it were strictly plain-text.
Stops reading.
Do you mean that there is a part that isn't text/plain ("HTML email") or that there is no part that is text/plain ("HTML-only email")?
> Quoted point 1
Response 1
> Quoted point 2
Response 2
Just quoting the entire original message and posting your reply at the bottom is as bad, if not worse, than just top posting.
As I create emails for customers and such I find some level of html / banner / something even beyond the subject is needed to help folks filter though all their emails.
In my experience emails with a company banner and large text indicating the reason for the email "your order has shipped" are spotted quickly by their customers / quickly understood / filtered easier.
This is what i think of whenever i change employers, and/or they rebrand and need "everyone to come on and let's all update our email sigs together to support the brand!" ugh!
[0] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/09/html-email-was-that-your-fa...
HTML is not the only problem with email that would be lessened if we could finally get people to start signing their emails and start treating anonymous emails with suspicion...
[1] https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:no_new_ae (See the "A proposed alternative solution to EFAIL" section)
OK.
But there were probably better ways to achieve lightweight formatting options that didn't include "Let's embed a full web browser in our email client."
Personally, I think evolving email into HTML has always been a foregone conclusion regardless of the inconvenience it causes to an extreme minority. Plus, I like the convenience of sending photos to grandma and checking her email is all she has the aptitude for anyway.
Long live HTML mail!
Second, hard wraps should not be mandatory and in fact discouraged. If someone wants 72 columns then there email client should be the one setting that, not the message itself.
Plain text email reminds me of the original ethos behind Markdown. "You're already doing it". Except, not everyone has the same rules. We can all read it but there becomes necessary a translation layer.
if you are using an email client that only supports plain-text, we’re probably already in some Matrix.org chatroom together or following each other on Mastodon and I’ll just hit you up there.
Marketing: lets try this new fancy widget floating on the left and that on the right, make it look good for Outlook v.xxx+ on android urghhh.
Hold Shift while clicking buttons like "Reply", "New Mail", "Forward" etc to change from plaintext into html (or vice versa, depending on your default).
I think most mail clients can do this, but thunderbird is what I use. On Windows, preferences may be under Tools instead. No idea on Mac.
Other email providers make you jump through hoops to send an email newsletter that looks like it came from a person.
I have it configured to plain-text by default.
If you're going to blame webmail, then blame the crappy broken webmail clients: Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc.
But not Gmail. Its good plain-text handling is one of the reasons I use it.
Nice that you have it set up that way but most people don't, therefore Gmail is still part of the problem. users just accept the defaults and that's part of the problem too.
I hate gmail, and always will. I think that google/gmail has caused untold damage to the internet as we know it and I will never use Google products again.
Gmail does plain text email just fine, and it's a major feature for me.