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Comment by koakuma-chan | Hacker News Reader

I wish people just sent plain text.

What about images, links? Formatted text like bold or underline?

I also prefer plain text, but in most of my emails I talk about technical stuff, or I send transactional emails that require actions, in which case showing buttons is a much better user experience than plain text.

I don’t want buttons in my emails.

But they are a lot easier to see and click (accessibility, larger hit area).

You could have a larger text instead of a button, but changing font size is also HTML and not plain-text anymore.

You can just send a link, and the user's client will probably highlight it even if it is plain text.

Yea, but how will they hide all the tracking URLs and base64 encoded PII from you in the email?

Using a URL shortener obviously. But you are right, if they only send plain text, they won't be able to include those 1x1 images at the bottom to track whether you have opened the email. Any sane email client blocks images by default, but whatever.

I don’t have problems seeing and clicking normal text, thank you very much. I don’t want buttons on my emails.

I think the OP app is meant for creating transactional emails (or bulk-send emails like newsletters).

Those templates should account for all types of people and accessibility levels (including things like ADHD, where you need a big red button to click, otherwise you get overwhelmed by a block of text).

Every MUA I've used allows the reader to set a font size, so changing font sizes is 100% a feature of plain-text emails. Then they get the link the size they need to read it correctly and it's absolutely easy to read. This here comment is pain text. Is it hard to read this link:

http://microsoft.com/

I don't think so. I certainly didn't have to resort to HTML to make that link readable and clickable.

> What about images, links? Formatted text like bold or underline?

Easy. Don't.

That's the great bit. You don't have to.

https://useplaintext.email/

Why isn't this website plain text then?

Probably because it's a website and not email.

But I have to send the same sort of information (albeit shorter) via email on a regular basis.

A lot of alerts, reporting, quotes, code snippets, short documentation or step by step instructions, etc.

I don't just send emails to say "Hey, let's meet at 5". You know the memes with "this could have been an email", it usually is this case.

Just to be clear, most of those rich emails are the automatic/transactional emails.

Yeah, I get it, I unfortunately live in the real world too. I like to keep it plain text whenever possible but it's extremely useful sometimes to have inline screenshots and stuff like that.

I didn't mean to be sarcastic but it's just that to me, philosophically, email is a plaintext technology that had HTML bolted on to it kicking and screaming, and it's always been kind of crap. People like me hate things that are fundamentally ugly and crap even if they are useful. The web was designed for HTML from the start.

I don't. Plain text is typically formatted for 72-78 monospace characters - even if you don't want formatting, the text will look bad on any device that doesn't match IBM's 80-character punch cards from 1928.

In theory format=flowed solves that, but the same boomers that despise HTML mail also refuse to provide that accommodation, for anyone not behind a teletype.

I used to think this, but lately I'm getting a lot of plain text marketing emails that are clearly LLMs. Now I dislike plain text emails just as much as HTML ones.

Yeah, the first example on that site doesn't need any formatting. It just says your code is <code>

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Plain text? Pffft.

Human language is an unnecessary abstraction, just like images.

I wish everyone would communicate in pure Binary.

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