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Comment by globalreset | Hacker News Reader

Text. Just use damn text. Nobody wants to look at your logo. Why biz people have to ruin everything.

Approximately no one outside of HN only wants text emails.

And the argument that anything beyond plain text is a waste and ruins everything applies to literally every single medium out there where the written word is conveyed: webpages, magazines, printed flyers, books, etc. It's laughable to think that all formatting of any kind beyond ASCII is a waste.

If it were up to HN readers, the entire world would be so ugly and boring.

Ultimately it depends on if it facilities the delivery of information. In most cases excessive styling does the opposite.

Why doesn't HN or reddit or most social media format messages in html like email? Email has been doing it for years. People would love it! Images, colors, tables, etc in every message!

And why not in text messages? Its 2023 guys.

Reddit does support images and tables in comments.

I love how there are thousands of internet forums, but you're a heavy participant on a forum that is so militantly text-only that emoji are silently removed from user-submitted content. It's almost like the policy you are arguing against has important effects on conversation quality that you don't understand or that you don't want to admit because your paycheck depends on email messages' being rendered as HTML.

>Approximately no one outside of HN only wants text emails.

Approximately no one outside of HN even knows that plain text is a thing distinct from HTML. Among those that do, many probably couldn't give an example from their digital experience of a place where user-submitted content must be plain text. (They can navigate those places just fine, though.)

Given how long dang has been claiming that someday we won’t have pagination and everything will be fast, I’m guessing whatever arc garbage runs HN just couldn’t handle emoji 17 years ago or whatever and that’s what we are stuck with.

Basically, I don’t think it’s militantly text-only, it’s just shit.

This link aggregator (it isn't a forum) would be shit if it allowed emoji.

You literally just used italic formatting in your own reply

It's good to be vigilant against hypocrisy, but there is such a thing as being too focused on possible hypocrisy.

What HN does, i.e., allow comments to contain a couple of carefully-chosen formatting options, is not a realistic option in email whereas because of a history of decades in which email clients could render only plain text, asking email senders to send plain text is a realistic option at least in some situations.

In other words, HN's designers were not restricted to a choice between plain text and full HTML, but in email we basically are (because there is no central authority in charge of email).

Agreed. If things look good then I enjoy looking at them more, and life is to be enjoyed. But more importantly, it's wrong that plain text is always the best way to communicate. A picture is worth a thousand words (often), and a good layout can make things easier to read.

It's more funny than that. Everyone wants text documents as well as rich documents as well as applications but no one wants a single file type to do all 3.

They totally do, but there is no single file type which supports all the formatting you might occasionally want, like math or floating text boxes or images, at least no format short of PDF. And which is editable, quotable (important for email, even Gmail keeps messing up quoting parts of numbered lists), efficient, implementable, and not a security liability.

So we keep choosing formats that support the subset of features that our current problem needs. Email multipart messages containing a "safe" subset of HTML has solved some problems adequately, and when it doesn't always work, we include a link to a web page, so you can show it in a real browser, or we attach or embed a PDF.

It gets quite hilarious when we take the design goals, technological difficulties both foreseen and experienced, insights picked up, compare the "end" results with the goals and then compare the excuses with what should have been possible technically.

As we cant blame anyone specific, I would have to conclude we did everything wrong and had very poor excuses for it.

A complete embarrassment. I find it rather entertaining but offer no solution.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19258

If only it was a simple logo. My HRs send emails with a full blown wallpaper on top, which stretches the inbox on a smaller screen so much that horizontal scroll appears, and text below it also overflows. Or when I disabple dynamic content, then they manage to create links inside the graphical buttons with no alt text, invisible without the picture. And these are people whose main job are emails. Sigh...

Sticker Mule sends marketing newsletter emails in plain text ONLY. I love it. They’re just:

> Hey ${name},

> Our custom holographic stickers are on for on for ${deal}.

And that’s it. I bet they have awesome deliverability because it’s… just email.

Ironically, plain text emails actually do better for us - the problem is that plaintext emails are often more likely to be caught up by spam filters.

The data I've seen suggests the opposite?

All of our internal tests have confirmed this, and even the email providers have more or less confirmed the same thing: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/plain-text-vs-html-emails...

That's HTML emails _pretending_ to be plain text.

Meaning the 'plain' text is Html-formatted to look plain and there are tracker links and probably tracking pixels too.

Real plain text should be just like something a human being typed.

Also, ignoring the general scamminess of hubspot, the linked article says html mail is MORE likely to be flagged as commercial. The article, in fact, is entirely pro plain text.

I'm pleasantly surprised that amazon actually sends plain text emails. Pretty much every other corporation insists on HTML mails.

I just checked, and they don't. It's certainly plain looking and without fancy styling/formatting, but they do send content-type text/html. The links and tracking pixel images are why they need HTML, I guess.

There's an account setting somewhere to always send plain text emails and do not send HTML. I don't know where the setting is, I enabled it many years ago. Been happy with that.

This appears to be untrue. I looked at all the amazon emails in my inbox and they are all:

  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
  Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Did you actually scroll through all the way? Some emails send both plain text and HTML. I looked through mine and indeed saw text/html for most Amazon emails (including AWS). Some AWS emails like ACM cert renewals were text/plain. Though like someone else said here, you may have changed a setting in your account preferences. The default is still HTML.

    ------=_Part_4161549_398020174.1685704999675
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

I have zero html attachments.

(These emails are not marketing emails which I don't get, they all relate to orders and shipping)

They aren’t talking about HTML attachments. HTML email is typically sent as a multipart/alternative email with one text/plain component and one text/html component. An email with attachments is a multipart/mixed email.

Mine have the text/plain header. I must have checked that setting like the sibling commenter said.

Tracking pixel in an email? I thought nobody had done that in decades because major webmail clients pre-cache all images to prevent leaking user IP etc.

I don't know about decades. It's true that a lot of clients do that nowadays, but they're definitely still used.

Email is capable of having both versions of the email so the user can decide what they want. We should go back to utilizing that more.

The clients also need to focus on this. Apple Mail on iOS uses plain text variant to show snippets, but if you try to expand the email, it only supports HTML, without a fallback to plain text. This is often the case on slow internet.

That isn’t true: Apple Mail is perfectly capable of showing plain-text-only messages.

The post you're responding to probably meant in the event of alternative HTML+text emails. Obviously if the email is plain text-only it won't invent HTML to show the user...

Nobody outside a tech cave wants to lose all the rich formatting in communication either

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