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Comment by StableAlkyne | Hacker News Reader

That's a completely valid opinion, and I prefer plaintext as well

But at this point, it's pretty clear that most non-technical people prefer emails with fancy text and graphics.

Personally, I'm just glad that email is a flexible enough medium to allow that. It's better than the alternative, where people moved to some closed, proprietary protocol behind like 20 patents that allows the same thing.

Is there any other common way we communicate over screens (aside from http) that has had the staying power of email for the general public? I think that's a testament to the sheer flexibility of it. The ugliness that people have contorted email into is a badge of honor IMO

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> But at this point, it's pretty clear that most non-technical people prefer emails with fancy text and graphics.

And what percentage of e-mails from people / human beings have those things?

Certainly marketing e-mails have fancy formats, but I've rarely seen any person at a companies I've worked at use any kind of formatting: generally most folks hit reply and start typing with whatever the default is. Hardly any italics or bold, and forget about fixed width (for things like CLI commands in technical discussions).

Heck, even Slack messages these styles are hardly used (on my current team I use them the most since I know that Markdown so it's easy for me to throw in some **, //, or `` in my typing flow, so I can highlight hostnames, CLI commands, etc).

Any e-commerce email showing you pictures of what you bought. People tend to find this convenient.

My wife has a fastmail account, but she uses her iMail client, so she can send inline photos with her email. Even FM can’t do that yet.

Huh? You can paste if you have an image in your buffer, or drag-drop image files into an email in the Fastmail composer. I paste images into emails from screenshots almost every day.

(I'll take this report as a "we need to make it clearer you can do this!")

Very happy Fastmail user here! Would love if images could be resized in the webapp. For some reason most screenshots I paste in get scaled up to a very unwieldy size.

Yeah, this is a common request :) I've added your prod to the "this is common" data

If plain text would support inline-images, I’d probably be okay with it. But it doesn’t, so I’m not.

I also generally prefer structured formatting to plain text.

They say an image is worth 1000 words.

If you're sending emails with thousands of words you have probably chosen the wrong medium.

And sometimes 22 can already be too many.

You must be joking. I write and receive emails containing lists, hyperlinks, or blockquotes all the time. I don't need the last flexbox technology, but some formatting is important.

There is always Rich Text…

> You must be joking. I write and receive emails containing lists, hyperlinks, or blockquotes all the time.

I am not.

I don't receive e-mails with fancy formatting at all. As for hyperlinks: I can paste a URL just fine without an <A HREF…> tag.

My guess SMS (and similar) (by volume) are more frequent than email.

Anecdotally, I only get 2-3 actual human emails per _year_. Rest is transactional spam.

That's you. My work emails receives 25-50 real human a day. I get less than that amount in SMS in an whole year on my work phone. Even my personal email is significantly more email than SMS. SMS is dying and replaced with messengers e.g. Teams, Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger etc.

No u.

I understand if you are manager/owner you might be running comms via email. But internally all of that went to slack for good reason - lack of history is a feature, not a bug.

> I understand if you are manager/owner you might be running comms via email. But internally all of that went to slack for good reason - lack of history is a feature, not a bug.

I am neither manager nor owner. Just another 1x engineer. 75% of my comms run over email. 25% over Jabber.

Not every software company uses Slack!

Well you are not op to begin with and admit running a chat app which is has 99% chance of having better UX than email.

Email is good for having common interface. In my case it's ~abused in 99% of cases.

Also - you do not mention how much non-comms emails do you receive. While chat apps are fucky in terms of lock-in, lack of interop and tons of other things, lack of spam is nice.

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