alt Hacker NewsMy 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 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.
My favorite is when the plain text version is a bunch of css and html.
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?
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.
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.