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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

While I greatly prefer plain text email, trimming quoted text that isn't relevant to the reply, and replying inline rather than top-posting, all the major email clients discourage this, or at least don't make it easy by default, so it's a lost cause in 2025 (and was lost long before today).

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It's only a lost cause if you decide to let it be.

Plain text email continues to work just fine for me every day.

My heart sank when I inline replied to a long email from a clinic, only to get a reply that “you only said hello and your message is empty”.

I don’t know what client they are using, or if they never received a properly formatter reply in their life.

Crappy helpdesk software does that. I've never bothered to ask those companies what garbage they're using though.

I have not had problems doing it for the last 35 years, so if you are using terrible tools, you should probably fix that.

You misunderstood, or I wasn't very clear. I have and use good email tools. I only meant that the crusade to get everyone else to follow is lost.

I am the one oddball in my office who doesn't use Outlook and who sends plain-text emails with ">" prefixed quotes. But I'm under no illusions that anyone else is going to be convinced, and I no longer make any effort to try.

Modern email clients are getting too clever for their own good, and I have no choice on what client others use.

For decades, inline replies worked perfectly—you'd quote the relevant part and respond right underneath it. But now email apps are "helping" by trimming messages into compact views, cutting off replies right at the first quoted section unless someone taps "show more."

I've basically abandoned inline replied and have gone back to dumping everything at the top like it's 1995.

The irony is these apps think they're making email better by hiding "clutter," but they're actually making conversations harder to follow.

You can still make the decision whether to top-post or inline-post based on your recipient. Programmer's mailing list -> inline post. Family member -> top post. You can send a stranger an inline post, somehow confirm they were able to view it, and include them in your mental whitelist of people that understand inline posting.

Kind of like how one adjusts their language / choice of words / choice of topics based on their recipient.

No one except fellow older tech heads seem to speak in the old ways

A possible work-around that comes to mind is always prefixing your reply with some form of ‘(reply below)’.

I wrote a tool for my boss years ago that would reformat emails for plain text and put those arrows and fix the indentation. He loved it so much. Older gentleman. I guess that's how he did it in his day and never saw the need to change. Glad I could make him happy with like 1 day of work. Tiny app.

Making more than a completely negligible group of people change tools - or even the settings of their tools - is what’s a lost cause.

The easiest way for this crusade to succeed would be to take aim at Outlook and Gmail and try to make them change defaults.

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