I use alpine, exclusively, for my personal and work emails.
It's beautiful, lightweight, efficient and can perform complex operations with keystrokes. Phishing URLs are glaringly obvious, I can quickly view full headers with a press of 'H', and no network traffic (trackers, pixels, counters) is generated by my interaction with the email.
There's one other thing:
If your mailtool runs over SSH and you send email to someone else running their mailtool over SSH on the same system ... the mail delivery is a local copy operation.
Which is to say: no rsync.net internal email has ever traversed a network.
Similar here with Mutt. And I’m happy to report that most emails still come with a text/plain part and don’t force you to use an HTML rendering fallback.
Another thing, set your mail readers to never automatically download images. This prevents the senders from knowing if/when/where from/and how often you read their message. There's always a button to download the linked images but its suprising how often it isn't needed. I do wish more mail clients had allow and deny lists for this function.
Why though? Sometimes it is useful to know whether the mail got delivered, i.e. for handing in assignments. Also the read notification is only sent on recipient wish.
DSN's Delivery Status Notifications are absolutely useful otherwise they never would have been created. Read-replies and out of office auto-replies that reply to non corporate primary domains are used to validate email addresses for spammers. Even DSN's can be abused this way. Older versions of Exchange would not limit out-of-office replies to the corporate domains.
One can drop read-replies and even out-of-office auto-replies without dropping specific DSN's. It is up to each organization how they wish to handle these. Some financial institutions will go full BOFH Bastard Operator from Hell, like me and some will cherry pick what goes through such as limiting responses to employees. Some will let everything through to justify the purchase of their anti-spam, anti-malware third party service. I was brought into existence in the 2150th level of hell.
So that is the cool thing about such rules is that one can cherry pick whichever meets the needs and requirements of their organization and this is just the beginning of what one can do. The first step in this process is to enable logging of Subjects, Attachment Names / Sizes, FCrDNS and others to syslog then start building reports to see what is leaking out of ones organization and what nonsense is flooding ones organization. Some DLP's Data Loss Prevention appliances can do some of this too but they can be pricey and may leak data to yet another third party. As a proper BOFH I keep logs in-house. Logging to a third party can get extra painful with newer privacy laws in some countries.
I always front-end exchange servers with multiple Postfix servers with large queues so that work can be done without losing things, extra logging can be enabled and extra anti-spam capabilities can be enabled or added.
While I greatly prefer plain text email, trimming quoted text that isn't relevant to the reply, and replying inline rather than top-posting, all the major email clients discourage this, or at least don't make it easy by default, so it's a lost cause in 2025 (and was lost long before today).
You misunderstood, or I wasn't very clear. I have and use good email tools. I only meant that the crusade to get everyone else to follow is lost.
I am the one oddball in my office who doesn't use Outlook and who sends plain-text emails with ">" prefixed quotes. But I'm under no illusions that anyone else is going to be convinced, and I no longer make any effort to try.
Modern email clients are getting too clever for their own good, and I have no choice on what client others use.
For decades, inline replies worked perfectly—you'd quote the relevant part and respond right underneath it. But now email apps are "helping" by trimming messages into compact views, cutting off replies right at the first quoted section unless someone taps "show more."
I've basically abandoned inline replied and have gone back to dumping everything at the top like it's 1995.
The irony is these apps think they're making email better by hiding "clutter," but they're actually making conversations harder to follow.
You can still make the decision whether to top-post or inline-post based on your recipient. Programmer's mailing list -> inline post. Family member -> top post. You can send a stranger an inline post, somehow confirm they were able to view it, and include them in your mental whitelist of people that understand inline posting.
Kind of like how one adjusts their language / choice of words / choice of topics based on their recipient.
I wrote a tool for my boss years ago that would reformat emails for plain text and put those arrows and fix the indentation. He loved it so much. Older gentleman. I guess that's how he did it in his day and never saw the need to change. Glad I could make him happy with like 1 day of work. Tiny app.
While I wholeheartedly agree with all of this, I feel like this ship may have sailed a very long time ago. Does it really make sense to continue fighting html email?
The main problem I always encountered when sending plan-text e-mails was quote formatting. The 72-character limit works well enough for my own reply, but when the quoted replies already consist of 72-character lines, adding several levels of indentation can break those up and mess up the formatting, since the client doesn’t extend the character limit for the quoted parts, resulting in something like this:
> > > Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do
eiusmod
> > > tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
Leaving it like that annoys me, while fixing it by hand gets tedious very fast. I suppose some clients might know how to handle this automatically, but I’ve never had the fortune of using one. (And frankly, plain-text formatting is not among my most important criteria when choosing an e-mail client.)
As many gotchas as HTML e-mail might have in practice, I find the basic idea of giving messages semantic structure make a whole lot of sense. And as for top posting, I understand the criticism, but I find it very suitable for straightforward, back-and-forth exchanges, which comprise a decent part of my e-mail communication. So overall, I can’t say I’m entirely sold on plain-text e-mail.
With terminal-based email programs, you can usually configure your favorite editor for email authoring. And Vim, for example, comes with support for handling email quotes appropriately when using the (paragraph) text formatting commands like gq [0].
Composing a hyperlink-heavy technical message in plain text sounds like hell for both me and the receiver. Rich text is good because it intuitively increases the signal to noise ratio of your message; attempting to substitute plain text causes it to plummet due to all the sigil spam and mental context switching required to "jump" to non-inline links and resources.
Switch your display to greyscale. Disable javascript in your browser. When someone sends you a meme, instead of clicking X to dismiss the facebook login popup and see the public page, reply "sorry, I don't have facebook". Become insufferable.
I had to suffer with many dinosaurs in a University I worked at, and they did in fact do pretty much everything you mentioned. Was a pain in the ass to upgrade/improve sites while trying to make sure these sites could operate without JavaScript. It was such a waste of resources just for a few people who refused to learn new things. The old way wasn't really faster, they just refused to learn the new way.
One of them even was browsing many webpages using a command line based browser rather than just using something like Firefox.
I use uBlock Origin with everything blocked by default. Most websites actually load fine. For those that don't, I manually whitelist just the scripts they need and then press the lock to remember that for the next time I visit that website.
As a non dinosaur, It's not actually hard nor tedious to not use JavaScript everywhere and I would recommend it. I think the problem in your situation may have been that those people actively made their problem your problem.
I prefer plain text email, but this cranky unix-user anti-features tradition is a bad thing. Discord won over IRC because the people who make IRC clients and servers think the world in 1999 was the pinnacle of engineering. It wasn’t.
Rich text emails are great. So are variable-width fonts.
Yeah, the occasional bold word, inline link, heading or even the occasional image can make a message much more readable. If you don't like bold words your client can ignore that tag.
I think this is partly an over-reaction to some senders that go way overboard with bright colours a hundred images and complex layout that doesn't render right on your screen size. But just because a capability can be used poorly doesn't mean that it can't be used well.
I can also understand that some people choose to prefer the text version of messages because it is so common to "abuse" HTML. And for those people I even include a text fallback in case their client doesn't have the ability to do that.
Mailmate on macos solves this very nicely. As a bonus my html mails have never looked better and i get the bonus of writing in text using markdown . Currently evaluating it.
Typing words to strangers online, worked just as well using IRC in 1999 as it does today. However my issue with Discord isn't the rich text, it's that Discord is a proprietary, centralised, CIA honeypot and a garbage company. Their Electron client is the least of their sins.
>Rich text emails are great.
They can be. They usually aren't. Yesterday I got a marketing email from an electricity provider. The unsubscribe link was 1302 characters of obfuscated Sendgrid bullshit. And it was full of tracking images and all links had click tracking. I wonder how this crap is GDPR compliant, because I'm fairly sure I never consented to any of this.
If you don’t like the emails your electricity provider sends you, don’t give them your email address, or filter all of their emails to the trash.
Rich text emails as a format and as a feature are great. If you don’t like the content of emails that doesn’t change the issue at all. In the alternative you are proposing, the unsubscribe link isn’t clickable at all.
(I also dislike Discord for many of the same reasons, but it won because it is better for users, because it has more features. Your complaints about it, which I share, are irrelevant to this discussion.)
Use whatever format and formatting your recipient wants. What they want is just a function of what client they use. If you are in an Outlook organization then just do whatever outlook does.
If you send to an external recipient you’ll need to guess, but if the recipient is at a medium to large corporation, chances are it’s Outlook there too.
And it’s not that people with html clients can’t read plaintext. It’s that it just looks odd to the recipient.
Once every 10000 emails I send something to one of the ”technical communities” mentioned. I can switch to plaintext then, or bottom/inline reply etc - because they expect or require it. But switching outright because a tiny group of niche techies find it a good idea? No, sorry. Email was eaten by gmail and Outlook and the only chance to change anything would be if their defaults changed (which isn’t happening).
The recipient will get what I deem to be appropriate. I will not, ever, stoop to the lowest common denominator of giving in to the tyranny of Outlook and its ilk.
I'm sending text, not a complete website to the recipient.
Yeah, I have to agree with this strongly. I worked at a University before and it was only the super old employees still using plain text email clients, everyone else was using Outlook. Most of the reason for not switching was simply due to a refusal to adapt and learn something new. Especially since there are more modern clients that also feature hotkeys/shortcuts that still allow you to do things quickly.
The people who refused to adapt to newer technology also caused slowdowns in other parts of the workplace as anything new that would be implemented in any site/service had to also try to account for people who wanted to do things old ways, instead of the faster new ways. Because they had 100 scripts they'd use to make the old way not suck as much and viewed that as better than learning the new way.
Realistically nobody is 100% productive, and the slight seconds that may be lost using a GUI based email client over something plaintext is insignificant.
On the other hand, it's perfectly reasonable not to give up the choice that you prefer and consider superior in many ways, just because ‘e-mail was eaten by Gmail and Outlook’. In fact, I personally feel great aversion to those two services and strongly dislike the idea of letting them dictate the way I use an open standard. If that was my main reason for ever using HTML e-mail (which, thankfully, it's not), I'd really rather just send plain text and have it look odd to the recipient.
I do and always did, but it's quite frequent that people call me on my weird emails (no colours ? no formatting ? weird !). It's a completely lost cause unfortunately in this eternal September.
I used to care about this, but these days it just seem pointless, and I just can't summon a slice of my limited energy for attention to care about this. I also find many of the reasons listed to be somewhat irrelevant:
> HTML as a vector for phishing
> Privacy invasion and tracking
> Higher incidence of spam
> Mail client vulnerabilities
These are all potentially reasons to disable the display of HTML email in your own mail client, but they aren't a reason not to send HTML email. As a sender, I know I'm not trying to phish my recipient, or invade their privacy or track them, or spam them, or try to trigger a mail client vulnerability. So these just don't matter.
From the recipient's point of view, many people receive HTML emails (that don't have an embedded plain-text alternative), and actually do need to read those emails. The kind of person who doesn't, likely already is a firm believer in plain-text-only and doesn't need to be convinced.
And other reasons seem dubious:
> HTML emails are less accessible
This is odd, because HTML has accessibility features built into it. Certainly a bunch of plain text is easier for a screen reader to deal with, but only if the sender doesn't care about conveying formatting or nuance at all. Later in the piece, the author suggests using asterisks, underscores, etc. to indicate bold/italic/etc., but I expect screen readers don't know what that's supposed to mean, so using such a thing will make your emails less accessible, not more.
> Some clients can't display HTML emails at all
The kind of people who use mail clients that can't display HTML email at all are probably not in your target audience if you are going to send HTML email. If people like that have deliberately chosen to use software that can't display everything out there, that's their choice, and they can deal with the consequences.
And anyway:
> In a text-only interface it's not possible to render an HTML email, and instead the reader will just see a mess of raw HTML text.
Then that's a missing feature in the terminal mail reader. If lynx and links can render HTML to a terminal in a useful, readable way, a mail reader can do so too.
> A lot of people simply send HTML emails directly to spam for this reason.
"A lot" is doing a bit of work there. I guess "a lot" of people in the author's small bubble?
> Rich text isn't that great, anyway
That's opinion, not fact, and reasonable people can reasonably disagree. I happen to be one of them. I actually don't use much in the way of text styling in my emails, but it's nice to have the option, and as someone who does sometimes receive actually-useful, non-spam HTML emails, the presentation/styling often does add to the experience, not detract.
> These clients all compose plain text emails by default, with correct quoting and text wrapping settings, requiring no additional configuration to use correctly.
Thunderbird is not in the list because it requires configuration.
The recommended list includes several GUIs and web clients.
I use alpine, exclusively, for my personal and work emails.
It's beautiful, lightweight, efficient and can perform complex operations with keystrokes. Phishing URLs are glaringly obvious, I can quickly view full headers with a press of 'H', and no network traffic (trackers, pixels, counters) is generated by my interaction with the email.
There's one other thing:
If your mailtool runs over SSH and you send email to someone else running their mailtool over SSH on the same system ... the mail delivery is a local copy operation.
Which is to say: no rsync.net internal email has ever traversed a network.
That's nice.
Similar here with Mutt. And I’m happy to report that most emails still come with a text/plain part and don’t force you to use an HTML rendering fallback.
Another thing, set your mail readers to never automatically download images. This prevents the senders from knowing if/when/where from/and how often you read their message. There's always a button to download the linked images but its suprising how often it isn't needed. I do wish more mail clients had allow and deny lists for this function.
And also disable MDN's [1] in stand-alone email clients and discard them in MTA's if your user-base is cool with it.
using WARN as testing example, change to DISCARD to drop them[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_receipt
Any way to add something like this to fastmail sieve system? thanks
Why though? Sometimes it is useful to know whether the mail got delivered, i.e. for handing in assignments. Also the read notification is only sent on recipient wish.
you cannot depend on it and trackers/scammers/... use it as a way to see if your address is actually alive or not.
DSN's Delivery Status Notifications are absolutely useful otherwise they never would have been created. Read-replies and out of office auto-replies that reply to non corporate primary domains are used to validate email addresses for spammers. Even DSN's can be abused this way. Older versions of Exchange would not limit out-of-office replies to the corporate domains.
One can drop read-replies and even out-of-office auto-replies without dropping specific DSN's. It is up to each organization how they wish to handle these. Some financial institutions will go full BOFH Bastard Operator from Hell, like me and some will cherry pick what goes through such as limiting responses to employees. Some will let everything through to justify the purchase of their anti-spam, anti-malware third party service. I was brought into existence in the 2150th level of hell.
So that is the cool thing about such rules is that one can cherry pick whichever meets the needs and requirements of their organization and this is just the beginning of what one can do. The first step in this process is to enable logging of Subjects, Attachment Names / Sizes, FCrDNS and others to syslog then start building reports to see what is leaking out of ones organization and what nonsense is flooding ones organization. Some DLP's Data Loss Prevention appliances can do some of this too but they can be pricey and may leak data to yet another third party. As a proper BOFH I keep logs in-house. Logging to a third party can get extra painful with newer privacy laws in some countries.
I always front-end exchange servers with multiple Postfix servers with large queues so that work can be done without losing things, extra logging can be enabled and extra anti-spam capabilities can be enabled or added.
ooh good point, I ensure read receipts are disabled too. What a bad feature these days.
And use https://www.emailprivacytester.com to test that your email client is configured correctly
Also does not work with fastmail.com adresses
Was a local error. Fixed now
ERR connection refused like error. I guess gmail doesn't like them
Sorry about that. Try again now
What’s interesting to see here is Apple’s "Protect Mail Activity" option working as advertised.
Loading images through their servers and throwing off the tracking software.
It still says you loaded it though.
While I greatly prefer plain text email, trimming quoted text that isn't relevant to the reply, and replying inline rather than top-posting, all the major email clients discourage this, or at least don't make it easy by default, so it's a lost cause in 2025 (and was lost long before today).
My heart sank when I inline replied to a long email from a clinic, only to get a reply that “you only said hello and your message is empty”.
I don’t know what client they are using, or if they never received a properly formatter reply in their life.
It's only a lost cause if you decide to let it be.
Plain text email continues to work just fine for me every day.
I have not had problems doing it for the last 35 years, so if you are using terrible tools, you should probably fix that.
You misunderstood, or I wasn't very clear. I have and use good email tools. I only meant that the crusade to get everyone else to follow is lost.
I am the one oddball in my office who doesn't use Outlook and who sends plain-text emails with ">" prefixed quotes. But I'm under no illusions that anyone else is going to be convinced, and I no longer make any effort to try.
Modern email clients are getting too clever for their own good, and I have no choice on what client others use.
For decades, inline replies worked perfectly—you'd quote the relevant part and respond right underneath it. But now email apps are "helping" by trimming messages into compact views, cutting off replies right at the first quoted section unless someone taps "show more."
I've basically abandoned inline replied and have gone back to dumping everything at the top like it's 1995.
The irony is these apps think they're making email better by hiding "clutter," but they're actually making conversations harder to follow.
You can still make the decision whether to top-post or inline-post based on your recipient. Programmer's mailing list -> inline post. Family member -> top post. You can send a stranger an inline post, somehow confirm they were able to view it, and include them in your mental whitelist of people that understand inline posting.
Kind of like how one adjusts their language / choice of words / choice of topics based on their recipient.
No one except fellow older tech heads seem to speak in the old ways
A possible work-around that comes to mind is always prefixing your reply with some form of ‘(reply below)’.
I wrote a tool for my boss years ago that would reformat emails for plain text and put those arrows and fix the indentation. He loved it so much. Older gentleman. I guess that's how he did it in his day and never saw the need to change. Glad I could make him happy with like 1 day of work. Tiny app.
Making more than a completely negligible group of people change tools - or even the settings of their tools - is what’s a lost cause.
The easiest way for this crusade to succeed would be to take aim at Outlook and Gmail and try to make them change defaults.
While I wholeheartedly agree with all of this, I feel like this ship may have sailed a very long time ago. Does it really make sense to continue fighting html email?
The main problem I always encountered when sending plan-text e-mails was quote formatting. The 72-character limit works well enough for my own reply, but when the quoted replies already consist of 72-character lines, adding several levels of indentation can break those up and mess up the formatting, since the client doesn’t extend the character limit for the quoted parts, resulting in something like this:
> > > Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do
eiusmod
> > > tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
Leaving it like that annoys me, while fixing it by hand gets tedious very fast. I suppose some clients might know how to handle this automatically, but I’ve never had the fortune of using one. (And frankly, plain-text formatting is not among my most important criteria when choosing an e-mail client.)
As many gotchas as HTML e-mail might have in practice, I find the basic idea of giving messages semantic structure make a whole lot of sense. And as for top posting, I understand the criticism, but I find it very suitable for straightforward, back-and-forth exchanges, which comprise a decent part of my e-mail communication. So overall, I can’t say I’m entirely sold on plain-text e-mail.
With terminal-based email programs, you can usually configure your favorite editor for email authoring. And Vim, for example, comes with support for handling email quotes appropriately when using the (paragraph) text formatting commands like gq [0].
[0] https://vimhelp.org/change.txt.html#formatting
Composing a hyperlink-heavy technical message in plain text sounds like hell for both me and the receiver. Rich text is good because it intuitively increases the signal to noise ratio of your message; attempting to substitute plain text causes it to plummet due to all the sigil spam and mental context switching required to "jump" to non-inline links and resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_ribbon_campaign
ASCII is always plaintext.
But plaintext may not always be ASCII.
Campaign started in 1998. How common was non-ASCII plaintext in 1998.
Except that “plain text” is more general than ASCII.
I spent some time hacking on things with dodo [1] but have fallen back to thunderbird for the time being.
I'd settle for something markdown-like rather than full-blown html. Basic headings, lists, and inline images are all I want.
[1] https://github.com/akissinger/dodo
For Proton users:
> Visit Settings → Appearance
> Set "Composer Mode" to "Plain Text"
This is out of date; the setting is now in "Messages and Composing" (after a break), not in "Appearance". (You'll have to scroll down a fair bit.)
i made a sendmail CLI for sending plain text mail using gmail and outlook REST APIs.
Gmail’s smtp gateway breaks plaintext formatting, restmail preserves it.
https://github.com/tonymet/restmail
Switch your display to greyscale. Disable javascript in your browser. When someone sends you a meme, instead of clicking X to dismiss the facebook login popup and see the public page, reply "sorry, I don't have facebook". Become insufferable.
I had to suffer with many dinosaurs in a University I worked at, and they did in fact do pretty much everything you mentioned. Was a pain in the ass to upgrade/improve sites while trying to make sure these sites could operate without JavaScript. It was such a waste of resources just for a few people who refused to learn new things. The old way wasn't really faster, they just refused to learn the new way.
One of them even was browsing many webpages using a command line based browser rather than just using something like Firefox.
I use uBlock Origin with everything blocked by default. Most websites actually load fine. For those that don't, I manually whitelist just the scripts they need and then press the lock to remember that for the next time I visit that website.
As a non dinosaur, It's not actually hard nor tedious to not use JavaScript everywhere and I would recommend it. I think the problem in your situation may have been that those people actively made their problem your problem.
> instead of clicking X to close the facebook login popup, reply "sorry, I don't have facebook"
Never send facebook links, problem solved. It's poor form.
The little "X" you refer to is rarely there for those of us who don't ever log in.
But I don't have Facebook. The worst is the incessant "call me back on WhatsApp". I don't use any of this crap.
What do you use? Not saying for a moment that anyone needs to use Facebook, but I'm curious if you use anything else...
Why would I limit proper display of my email to 78 character wide monospace devices?
I think mobile viewing and most marketing email is around that limit. So not really a hard choice to make.
They go into that at length in section 4.
I prefer plain text email, but this cranky unix-user anti-features tradition is a bad thing. Discord won over IRC because the people who make IRC clients and servers think the world in 1999 was the pinnacle of engineering. It wasn’t.
Rich text emails are great. So are variable-width fonts.
Yeah, the occasional bold word, inline link, heading or even the occasional image can make a message much more readable. If you don't like bold words your client can ignore that tag.
I think this is partly an over-reaction to some senders that go way overboard with bright colours a hundred images and complex layout that doesn't render right on your screen size. But just because a capability can be used poorly doesn't mean that it can't be used well.
I can also understand that some people choose to prefer the text version of messages because it is so common to "abuse" HTML. And for those people I even include a text fallback in case their client doesn't have the ability to do that.
I'm sure markdown email has been done? But just didn't gain traction?
GNOME Evolution supports Markdown natively (I believe either raw or rendered to HTML on send; I use the latter.)
Mailmate on macos solves this very nicely. As a bonus my html mails have never looked better and i get the bonus of writing in text using markdown . Currently evaluating it.
>1999 was the pinnacle of engineering
Typing words to strangers online, worked just as well using IRC in 1999 as it does today. However my issue with Discord isn't the rich text, it's that Discord is a proprietary, centralised, CIA honeypot and a garbage company. Their Electron client is the least of their sins.
>Rich text emails are great.
They can be. They usually aren't. Yesterday I got a marketing email from an electricity provider. The unsubscribe link was 1302 characters of obfuscated Sendgrid bullshit. And it was full of tracking images and all links had click tracking. I wonder how this crap is GDPR compliant, because I'm fairly sure I never consented to any of this.
If you don’t like the emails your electricity provider sends you, don’t give them your email address, or filter all of their emails to the trash.
Rich text emails as a format and as a feature are great. If you don’t like the content of emails that doesn’t change the issue at all. In the alternative you are proposing, the unsubscribe link isn’t clickable at all.
(I also dislike Discord for many of the same reasons, but it won because it is better for users, because it has more features. Your complaints about it, which I share, are irrelevant to this discussion.)
Hard no.
Use whatever format and formatting your recipient wants. What they want is just a function of what client they use. If you are in an Outlook organization then just do whatever outlook does.
If you send to an external recipient you’ll need to guess, but if the recipient is at a medium to large corporation, chances are it’s Outlook there too.
And it’s not that people with html clients can’t read plaintext. It’s that it just looks odd to the recipient.
Once every 10000 emails I send something to one of the ”technical communities” mentioned. I can switch to plaintext then, or bottom/inline reply etc - because they expect or require it. But switching outright because a tiny group of niche techies find it a good idea? No, sorry. Email was eaten by gmail and Outlook and the only chance to change anything would be if their defaults changed (which isn’t happening).
I disagree with you vehemently.
The recipient will get what I deem to be appropriate. I will not, ever, stoop to the lowest common denominator of giving in to the tyranny of Outlook and its ilk.
I'm sending text, not a complete website to the recipient.
Both you, and your parent, should consider changing your view in favor of Postel's law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
"... be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept ..."
Yeah, I have to agree with this strongly. I worked at a University before and it was only the super old employees still using plain text email clients, everyone else was using Outlook. Most of the reason for not switching was simply due to a refusal to adapt and learn something new. Especially since there are more modern clients that also feature hotkeys/shortcuts that still allow you to do things quickly.
The people who refused to adapt to newer technology also caused slowdowns in other parts of the workplace as anything new that would be implemented in any site/service had to also try to account for people who wanted to do things old ways, instead of the faster new ways. Because they had 100 scripts they'd use to make the old way not suck as much and viewed that as better than learning the new way.
Realistically nobody is 100% productive, and the slight seconds that may be lost using a GUI based email client over something plaintext is insignificant.
On the other hand, it's perfectly reasonable not to give up the choice that you prefer and consider superior in many ways, just because ‘e-mail was eaten by Gmail and Outlook’. In fact, I personally feel great aversion to those two services and strongly dislike the idea of letting them dictate the way I use an open standard. If that was my main reason for ever using HTML e-mail (which, thankfully, it's not), I'd really rather just send plain text and have it look odd to the recipient.
Well, I as a recipient want plain text.
Some previous discussions:
2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39033046
2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32810515
2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20513987
"How about you use a mail client from this century." --the IT guy from a former job
I do and always did, but it's quite frequent that people call me on my weird emails (no colours ? no formatting ? weird !). It's a completely lost cause unfortunately in this eternal September.
I used to care about this, but these days it just seem pointless, and I just can't summon a slice of my limited energy for attention to care about this. I also find many of the reasons listed to be somewhat irrelevant:
> HTML as a vector for phishing
> Privacy invasion and tracking
> Higher incidence of spam
> Mail client vulnerabilities
These are all potentially reasons to disable the display of HTML email in your own mail client, but they aren't a reason not to send HTML email. As a sender, I know I'm not trying to phish my recipient, or invade their privacy or track them, or spam them, or try to trigger a mail client vulnerability. So these just don't matter.
From the recipient's point of view, many people receive HTML emails (that don't have an embedded plain-text alternative), and actually do need to read those emails. The kind of person who doesn't, likely already is a firm believer in plain-text-only and doesn't need to be convinced.
And other reasons seem dubious:
> HTML emails are less accessible
This is odd, because HTML has accessibility features built into it. Certainly a bunch of plain text is easier for a screen reader to deal with, but only if the sender doesn't care about conveying formatting or nuance at all. Later in the piece, the author suggests using asterisks, underscores, etc. to indicate bold/italic/etc., but I expect screen readers don't know what that's supposed to mean, so using such a thing will make your emails less accessible, not more.
> Some clients can't display HTML emails at all
The kind of people who use mail clients that can't display HTML email at all are probably not in your target audience if you are going to send HTML email. If people like that have deliberately chosen to use software that can't display everything out there, that's their choice, and they can deal with the consequences.
And anyway:
> In a text-only interface it's not possible to render an HTML email, and instead the reader will just see a mess of raw HTML text.
Then that's a missing feature in the terminal mail reader. If lynx and links can render HTML to a terminal in a useful, readable way, a mail reader can do so too.
> A lot of people simply send HTML emails directly to spam for this reason.
"A lot" is doing a bit of work there. I guess "a lot" of people in the author's small bubble?
> Rich text isn't that great, anyway
That's opinion, not fact, and reasonable people can reasonably disagree. I happen to be one of them. I actually don't use much in the way of text styling in my emails, but it's nice to have the option, and as someone who does sometimes receive actually-useful, non-spam HTML emails, the presentation/styling often does add to the experience, not detract.
>but they aren't a reason not to send HTML email
I've seen a lot of email providers flag random emails for having weird HTML. why take the chance of non-delivery at all? send plain text.
I've never seen this.
Weird omission of some clients like Thunderbird from the list.
https://useplaintext.email/#thunderbird
Yet it’s missing from the recommendation list.
I don’t think you’re going to get many people switching from mail.google.com to something in a terminal emulator straight away.
The recommendations list is described thus:
> These clients all compose plain text emails by default, with correct quoting and text wrapping settings, requiring no additional configuration to use correctly.
Thunderbird is not in the list because it requires configuration.
The recommended list includes several GUIs and web clients.
Thunderbird is basically a web browser that executes whatever you want it to.
Given the unfathomably bloated mess the desktop issue has become it doesn't entirely belong in the list of recommended clients.
There’s no other cross platform GUI client I can think of.
Claws and Sylpheed come to mind.
* https://www.claws-mail.org/downloads.php
* https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/download.html
Compare those to https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/all
I can't find a current download for modern macOS on either of the first two
https://brew.sh/
Shouldn't need Homebrew to install a GUI email client.
Really shouldn't need to explain that, IMO.
Intentional or not, good omission though.