Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw0101c | Hacker News Reader

> 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).

View on HN

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.

> 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.

There is always Rich Text…

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com