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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

My pet peeve are services that go out of their way to include a text/plain alternative message part but send something useless, such as the message without the key link. One time I seriously ran into a service just send a short one-sentence note along the lines of "this is a plain text email" as the plain text part. If you don't want to support plain text, maybe just don't send the alternative part?

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I find the ones that try to be cute the most frustrating because these appear on the new message notifications so I can't just delete them straight from the notification.

We'd love to share this exciting announcement but you'll a different email app.

Although I guess the argument will be that email clients should use AI to summarise the HTML into a plain text summary.

> Although I guess the argument will be that email clients should use AI to summarise the HTML into a plain text summary.

Or you could pass it through ~5,000 lines of C [1] and you will have it done in milliseconds even on hardware that would be old enough to drink.

[1]: https://codemadness.org/webdump.html

This might be me being old, but I still don't understand why html emails aren't the exception. If you want to do a fancy newsletter, trying to sell me crap, I can see why you'd need the images, the css and html. In most other cases, I don't really get the point.

What comes to mind

- You are sending a receipt and want table alignment for items

- You want to put a logo of your company so that readers can recognize who's the email from

- You want to make unsubscribe link smaller and the "open the thing I'm notifying you about" link bigger, so that people would know which one is which without reading the url

- You want to add a header

Mostly those seems to be more about you as a sender wanting to do some branding or manipulation of the reader. I don't really see how it benefit the receiver, which should be the main concern of all communications.

You don't see how a table can communicate things more clearly and benefit both the reader and sender?

I had one who sent me the booking details of another client in the plaintext part. I reported it to them nearly a year ago and they didn't reply, so screw anonymity, it was Avis.

If you're in EU or California, you should probably email the local data privacy official's offices about that.

Then report it to your government authority in charge of GDPR Enforcement. They suddenly will care very much about it

text/plain != plaintext

This is about media types, not encryption.

Do you think I was talking about encryption, or is it not more likely I meant text/plain given the context?

I'm sorry, I did not properly read and comprehend your original post. I thought you were saying "they put sensitive details in the text/plain part", implying that those details somehow only belonged in the text/html part. What you actually said was "they put somebody else's sensitive details in the text/plain part".

So I'm wondering a bit here - I've seen an implementation where emails to send only have html versions, but as part of the sending process the html is run through a Lynx browser process with the -dump command to get the plain text, which is included as the text/plain part of the email.

Is there actual value to this? e.g. Is the output of Lynx's text dump better for plain-text email clients than whatever they'd display for html emails?

Some (old?) spam filters may be triggered by html only emails.

I've personally converted html to plaintext with beautifulsoup in python, and used that as the plaintext version. Did not have complaints, but I honestly don't know who actually reads the non-html version.

Epic Games tells me I don't support HTML formatted email. Many emails are just the HTML version with HTML tags removed, leaving behind a bunch of ridiculously long image and link urls and little to no text telling you what they are. You might have better luck with a partial HTML implementation (pull out the title, alt, src, href attributes) than disabling it entirely.

the best is when some put the same payload in the text/plain part as in the text/html part. yes. the html source. as text/plain.

My favorite is when the plain text version is a bunch of css and html.

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