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Comment by gucci-on-fleek | Hacker News Reader

Evolution lets you default to the plain text version of an email, even if it contains an HTML version [0], so if you have that setting enabled (which I do, and strongly recommend), it should hopefully reduce the impact of this issue.

[0] Edit > Preferences > Mail Preferences > HTML Messages > HTML Mode = Show plain text if present

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That's a load-bearing "if present" there. Companies that want to track you can just send email without plaintext versions and you're still vulnerable.

The good news: even if you think the AI is good-for-nothing, rewriting HTML into legible plaintext is the one thing it can do pretty well. And probably even a 3B model would do well on this task, so you don't need to send the email body off to the cloud to be data-mined.

Why do we need AI for that? Can’t we just strip html tags?

You could do that, actually. I brought up AI because it could result in slightly cleaner output than just the naive de-tagging, and because you can use it for general purpose text tasks - not just HTML to plaintext but also semantic message labelling/search, suggestion of task items in a to-do list, maybe some other things too.

Can't wait for half of my emails being hallucinated

That's such a silly overkill use of AI. I'm not having my mail server kick off a 100W GPU every time I receive an email just to extract text from a structured document, nor am I having my computer drain my battery the moment I receive an email. Outsourcing the ridiculous power consumption to the cloud as some kind of dataleak-as-a-service is even worse. I'd rather try to parse the HTML with regex.

>can just send email without plaintext

How? Even if they write in HTML only there is nothing which could prevents a email client from just not rendering them which would mean plaintext.

For that to work, you need to enable the "only show plain" setting, not the "show plaintext if present".

And you'll probably get a lot of empty emails you can't read that way, unless you configure the plaintext plugin to dump the HTML into the reader view.

If an E-Mail client does not have such a basic feature you should use a better one e.g. thunderbird/claw

Not at all. You will see the HTML code but not render which is easily readable since HTML is very simple.

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