That's a completely valid opinion, and I prefer plaintext as well
But at this point, it's pretty clear that most non-technical people prefer emails with fancy text and graphics.
Personally, I'm just glad that email is a flexible enough medium to allow that. It's better than the alternative, where people moved to some closed, proprietary protocol behind like 20 patents that allows the same thing.
Is there any other common way we communicate over screens (aside from http) that has had the staying power of email for the general public? I think that's a testament to the sheer flexibility of it. The ugliness that people have contorted email into is a badge of honor IMO
> 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).
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.
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.
That's you. My work emails receives 25-50 real human a day. I get less than that amount in SMS in an whole year on my work phone. Even my personal email is significantly more email than SMS. SMS is dying and replaced with messengers e.g. Teams, Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger etc.
I understand if you are manager/owner you might be running comms via email. But internally all of that went to slack for good reason - lack of history is a feature, not a bug.
> I understand if you are manager/owner you might be running comms via email. But internally all of that went to slack for good reason - lack of history is a feature, not a bug.
I am neither manager nor owner. Just another 1x engineer. 75% of my comms run over email. 25% over Jabber.
Well you are not op to begin with and admit running a chat app which is has 99% chance of having better UX than email.
Email is good for having common interface. In my case it's ~abused in 99% of cases.
Also - you do not mention how much non-comms emails do you receive. While chat apps are fucky in terms of lock-in, lack of interop and tons of other things, lack of spam is nice.
> IMO, HTML was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content is the best content.
Your first statement might be true (it's debatable). Your second is definitely false.
Lets assume that HTML really was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content for email is still not the best content.
People want to:
1. Click on a link in the email, not fumble with copy and paste on their phone.
2. See decently formatted paragraphs and content with bold, italics and different font sizes for headings and paragraphs, not a wall of text.
3. See images in the email itself, not have to once again fumble around with copy and paste.
4. Correctly formatted bullet points, including sub-lists.
For all of the above, some sort of format is required. If we exclude HTML as a possibility, you're still going to have to need a format of some type, because the wall-o-text format is not a good UI.
1. all links are click-able at this point; what's more plain-text would force to provide just a link without all the tracking garbage
2. you can have paragraphs and headings... it's just a matter of structure - using html you can write a wall of text just fine
3. not sure if needed, besides you can attach images to plain text (though not inlining) or click-able links to external sources (at exact place)
4. still - easily do-able; it's a matter of particular editor tracking lists - for markdown editors it works just fine and in the end you virtually have a "plain text bullet list"... magic.
The most contagious/problematic issue is (3) and inlining - as I said, it's possible to attach anything but the location is lost. Probably something simple like anchor (again, markdown linking comes to mind) to indicate placement would be just fine...
> 1. all links are click-able at this point; what's more plain-text would force to provide just a link without all the tracking garbage 2. you can have paragraphs and headings... it's just a matter of structure - using html you can write a wall of text just fine 3. not sure if needed, besides you can attach images to plain text (though not inlining) or click-able links to external sources (at exact place) 4. still - easily do-able; it's a matter of particular editor tracking lists - for markdown editors it works just fine and in the end you virtually have a "plain text bullet list"... magic.
I think this comment displays the problems with plain text. I really couldn't have provided a better example.
As regards the counterpoints:
1. All links are clickable
Yes, and that's a bug. "http://www.example.com" should not be a clickable line. More to the point, it's not plain text anymore if the user gets something that has been interpreted and then rendered by the software.
2. It's not obvious how this should be done, and how it should reflow. You yourself failed to manage this in your reply, which I consider a good argument for why plain text is a poor UI.
3. Who cares whether you need it or not. The reality is that the clear majority of people use it!
4. Once again, if we're talking about a specific format that gets rendered into something readable, then it's not plain text anymore.
I'm arguing against the GPs assertion that plain text is the best format, not that markdown is insufficient.
> More to the point, it's not plain text anymore if the user gets something that has been interpreted and then rendered by the software.
Arguably it is. It was sent as plain text and received as plain text. The fact that the recipient's software goes through and interprets that plain text and does something when it detects an URL in it doesn't change that. If the recipient were to use some other software that doesn't do that, they'd see... Plain text. Because that's what it is.
> Arguably it is. It was sent as plain text and received as plain text. The fact that the recipient's software goes through and interprets that plain text and does something when it detects an URL in it doesn't change that. If the recipient were to use some other software that doesn't do that, they'd see... Plain text. Because that's what it is.
Exactly like .... the subset of HTML we see in emails?
I have not yet gotten an HTML email that, when displayed in plain-text, was unreadable. Neither, I suspect, have you.
> what's more plain-text would force to provide just a link without all the tracking garbage
I'm glad that you never ever received any link to some derivation of st.es.rui.tracking/bzzz/pfrrrrt?campaign=hn that hide the real link, but in the real world, that's how tracking is done. Plain text doesn't prevent anything.
> not sure if needed, besides you can attach images to plain text (though not inlining) or click-able links to external sources (at exact place)
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
You want to argue that plain text is better, but your arguments are that plain tex, are better for you. Don't make the mistake to assume that your specific experience is a workable average.
Please don't conflate adopting stupid solution to a problem that goes overboard (HTML) with equally stupid being stuck in shell and building stuff and using CLI...
PS. I assume all your github readme.md are all in full-blown HTML sprinkled with tracking links? :P
> I'm glad that you never ever received any link to some derivation of st.es.rui.tracking/bzzz/pfrrrrt?campaign=hn that hide the real link, but in the real world, that's how tracking is done. Plain text doesn't prevent anything.
That's the thing - I do get lots of them. In the age of html+plain and abuse of tracking (because it's so easy to hide with html), plain text version is just littered with this nonsense...
For example I just got notification from allegro.pl (shopping platform) and all links have that:
As for attachments - obvious exaggeration to dismiss actual issue: bravo…
> You want to argue that plain text is better, but your arguments are that plain tex, are better for you. Don't make the mistake to assume that your specific experience is a workable average.
Don't assume that someone using HTML actually do it conciously or is glad to receive it in that form because average user doesn't complain about it
So you're agreeing that plain text doesn't prevent tracking ? And that advocating for it won't solve the problem ?
> As for attachments - obvious exaggeration to dismiss actual issue: bravo…
No, the issue is that you can't tell everyone to "just upload the picture somewhere and put the link in the middle", that's unreasonable. That is the issue. HTML solves an issue.
> Don't assume that someone using HTML actually do it conciously or is glad to receive it in that form because average user doesn't complain about it
Average users want formatting. Plain text doesn't provide it. HTML for emails sucks, but plain text isn't a solution to that.
> Regarding 1. it's up to the client to parse and highlight links in plain text.
If the client is interpreting the content and then displaying its interpretation to the user, then it's not plain text anymore, is it? It's a format; in this case it's a poorly-specified, ad-hoc format and broken format[1] that is worse than simply having a reduced ad-hoc HTML format.
Just like HTML is "plain text" which is interpreted by the client and that interpretation is displayed to the user.
[1] For example, what if the sender types in `You should go to http://ww.example.com, where "example" must be replaced with your company name`? Suddenly `www.example.com` has an unintended DDoS!
> If the client is interpreting the content and then displaying its interpretation to the user, then it's not plain text anymore, is it?
Yes it is.
> It's a format
Yes, plain text is a format. The best format.
> in this case it's a poorly-specified, ad-hoc format and broken format[1] that is worse than simply having a reduced ad-hoc HTML format.
Well sure, plain text sucks at being HTML. That's because it isn't HTML; it's plain text. Plain text is not "poorly-specified, ad-hoc and broken" as plain text; only as HTML. The solution is not to use it as HTML.
> For example, what if the sender types in `You should go to http://ww.example.com, where "example" must be replaced with your company name`? Suddenly `www.example.com` has an unintended DDoS!
Ah, so that doesn't happen if the sender types in the wrong thing in HTML...?
>> For example, what if the sender types in `You should go to http://ww.example.com, where "example" must be replaced with your company name`? Suddenly `www.example.com` has an unintended DDoS!
> Ah, so that doesn't happen if the sender types in the wrong thing in HTML...?
I can't tell if you're being purposely contrarian or simply don't understand users.
The problem: Things that shouldn't be links get turned into links.
Your response: $SOME_OTHER_PROBLEM
I mean, really? You can't tell the difference between someone making a typo when intending to write a link and someone making a typo that results in a link?
So if you send that as text that isn't HTMLified by the recipient's client, they'll copy it as text and paste it into the adress line of the browser. The problem is still that the recipient goes to an adress the sender didn't intend (i.e. the recipient is stupid); has nothing to do with HTML vs text.
Or, if you want, the problem is that the recipient's client software HTMLifies text. Stupid client software (and possibly stupid recipient, for using the stupid software). Still has nothing to do with HTML vs text per se. Yes, that is literally $SOME_OTHER_PROBLEM. I mean, really? You can't tell the difference between various formats and problems caused by something else entirely?
(I get the feeling your supercilious "I mean, really?" was intended to slyly convey that I was the one being stupid here. IMO that backfired rather convincingly.)
Oh interesting, I pasted a URL in plain text and a bit of code in HN turned it into a link you can click on. I think it's totally fine for email clients to do that too.
The only thing I find redeeming about HTML email is the ability to have inline images so when I'm illustrating some sort of process to somebody I can do it more clearly. Without those, I'd create and send a proper document (I don't object to attachments), or publish the information on a wiki/blog/etc - but perhaps a those would be overall better approaches than a 'rich' email.
Hard disagree. Things like bolding text, adding pictures, changing colors, etc are very important for the emails I send. So some amount of HTML is important to me.
Lack of ability to distinguish between pre-formatted text and regular prose alone makes it a complete non-starter for most who aren't reading monospaced text in a terminal. I don't really like reading monospace text for prose (many people don't), and using proportional fonts means things that are supposed to be aligned will break (and if you restrict yourself to text only, you'll find yourself aligning things on occasion for tables or other content).
I actually use plain text in FastMail because it's "better" than HTML (usually), but it's not good.
Ability to send text/markdown natively would be pretty brilliant.
Ctrl-D to format the selected text as monospace in the Fastmail composer is pretty nice - I use it often for sending bits of log line or terminal output when writing up incidents or describing how to do something.
Gemtext[1] would have been perfect and way enough while still being legible on a terminal. Italic and bold can be done via unicode, you don't need a markup language for that.
This reads me as "I prefer letters" or "I prefer fax"
HTML is what non-techies want, or rather, they want to insert pictures and videos directly inline. They want to bold and highlight. They want bullet lists and numbered lists. They want to change fonts, make headlines, etc.. And they want it all to reflow for their device.
I do to. I don't want to say in the 70s terminal. I get that lots of techies wish the world was still 80 column monochrome ASCII only but you're the exception.
I think the "techies" that you are referring to just see the issues with html email that the non-techies don't notice. Some of course just want things to be more like the 80-column monochrome that you mention, but for most it's not that extreme.
I think HTML is way too complicated for email, and it would have been much better if they'd standardised on a version of markdown.
That ship has sailed though, so we're stuck between using HTML or plain text.
It's not like many spammers are using SPF and DKIM.
And then you have google sending bounce emails to spam although they already know with SPF that the original mail came from somewhere else making them the spammers.
Pretty much the only credit I'll give to Amazon is that they give the option to get plaintext emails. Doesn't mask the larger problems, but still a nice thing I wish was the norm.
That should be up to the recipient. Every other vendor provides this essential information in order confirmations.
Amazon's refusal to do so means you can't search your E-mail history for purchases (at tax time, for example). Or for warranty info or service. You may not know where you bought a particular item. Or which Amazon account you might have used.
If everyone followed Amazon's anti-customer example, you'd have to log into every E-commerce site you ever bought something from and search your order history... year by year... to find something. Unacceptable BS.
It's easy to say this, but can you imagine the hodge-podge of proprietary garbage we'd have to deal with if you couldn't email a simple file attachment to someone?
I'm good with attachment when you need to send me a real document, but if the email text itself ends up being multi-megabyte blob because you absolutely must have your name in the signature in blue and italic, then I tend to frown upon this. Over decades of my work I probably sent thousands of emails, yet very rarely if ever I needed HTML capabilities, and pretty much never ones that go beyond very basic Markup formatting.
Email attachments are defined through MIME and don't depend at all on HTML being available as a Content-Type. We could well have had another format and attachments together.
HTML is not needed for attachments to work. If the government for example, banned all use of HTML in emails, people could still attach (non-HTML) files to emails the same way they do now. Therefore the comment I replied to, a defense of HTML in emails, is a bogus argument.
> The point is that attachments are needed to make HTML work.
They are not.
MIME headers are helpful for telling MUAs what the content (type and/or disposition) of a message is, but there's nothing from stoping mail clients from just putting "raw" HTML in the body of an e-mail message without MIME.
A browser engine is necessary to render an HTML email, and browser engines have large attack surfaces -- and in general they are very complicated, which makes them difficult to reason about.
Also, normies don't write HTML, but rather they depend on services (like Gmail) offered by corporations to transform their composition into HTML, which gives the corporations and avenue to track me or to try to persuade or influence me unless I want to respond by instructing my normie friend never to send me email.
In general, HTML email brings the privacy and security problems of the web to email.
Also, HTML makes email much harder to archive because an HTML document's legibility often depends on references (embedded in the HTML document) to files on the internet, and these references to online files tend to rot.
Some of us are tired of web tech spreading its tentacles everywhere, especially to technologies like email that were already useful and mature before web tech started spreading to them.
I think that hodge podge (OneDrive, Google drive, Dropbox, etc) is what most people already use. "Simple file attachments" are an oxymoron these days--size/extension restrictions, spam scores, not to mention the hell of iterating over email.
Depends on your use case. Sometimes I want to send a document and not have the receiver change it at their whims. E.g. quotes for jobs. Simple attachments are great for that. Also I find some people who aren't good with tech find attachments much easier to deal with. If I send a an attachment I am 100% confident the other person can open it. No so for sharing links etc.
