alt Hacker News> HTML breaks not only the philosophy but also many of the tools developed around email
I was one of these die-hard-text-only people, back in the mid to late 90s. It was true. People were sending HTML/rich text emails, and it broke everything, and it was awful to read with. Not to mention the kilobytes of bandwidth wasted!
But it's 2024 now. There are vastly more tools that can deal with HTML email than those that can't. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if it's 4 orders of magnitude.
Sorry, folks, we lost. Email is not plain text any more. We can't pretend that it is or should be.
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As someone who started using plaintext emails recently, HTML emails are still awful in 2024. Besides being a ugly hack on top of an originally text-only protocol, it encourages bad practices like top-posting, bad alignment etc. What's really intolerable though, is the external and dynamic content in email. I expect email to be a long-term record, not something that changes after I receive it. They should find another tool for that. Besides, most GUI clients just block external content due to security risks anyway.
Perhaps LLMs can solve this somewhat? Not for email summarization - but to intelligently strip away all the HTML fluff and return a plain text version of the contents.
> But it's 2024 now. There are vastly more tools that can deal with HTML email than those that can't. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if it's 4 orders of magnitude.
Is it? Whatsapp, Signal, Slack, Notion, ChatGTP, are amongst the apps I use daily - and used by many non-hacker daily, that's pretty much "text only". all support some (subset of) markdown, which is close to "plain text" than to "HTML" in editing and displaying.
What I am trying to say is not that email should use markdown, or that HTML-email is bad or good. What I am trying to say is that there's clear and obvious proof that, in 2024, there's a need and use for "plain text". Even in tools that overlap with what email does.
> Email is not plain text any more. We can't pretend that it is or should be.
I send plain text emails and this is a hill I will die on. :-)
Do you not contribute to the development of any open-source projects that only accept patches via plain text emails sent to mailing lists (e.g., many GNU projects)?
Here's a tip for anyone who sends plain text emails, or wants to, and has to deal with annoying normies who complain about undesirable wrapping[1] when viewing plain text emails on mobile devices with small screens: configure your mail client to allow lines in emails to be up to 998 characters[2], which is longer than any paragraph you will likely write. I did this for my work email years ago.
[1] https://www.arp242.net/email-wrapping.html
[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5322#section-2.1.1