[HN Gopher] Use Plaintext Email
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Use Plaintext Email
Author : smartmic
Score : 50 points
Date : 2024-01-17 20:33 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (useplaintext.email)
(TXT) w3m dump (useplaintext.email)
| lproven wrote:
| This is the truth.
|
| Want to look like a pro in email? Plain text, bottom posted,
| trimmed.
|
| Replying wherever the email app happens to leave the cursor is
| like driving down the road wherever your car happened to be
| pointing. It's antisocial, stupid, and makes the experience much
| worse for everyone. Learn to drive. Learn to email.
| tptacek wrote:
| Serious question: why do I want to "look like a pro in email"?
| johnea wrote:
| You'd rather look like an amateur?
| eli wrote:
| I'm not sure I want the styling of my email to be
| especially noteworthy
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| It is worth considering that every interaction you have
| tells other people something about you. Many people don't
| spend much time thinking about what small choices say
| about them, but they always tell a story whether you want
| them to or not. Sometimes it can be a good idea to
| optimize those messages (especially in a professional
| context). I would argue that it is much more important
| what you write, rather than where you write it, but
| everything says something, and what it says is very
| context dependent.
| tptacek wrote:
| What kind of person am I interacting with that cares
| about email this way? It's certainly not customer
| prospects or investors, both of whom have HTML email junk
| you wouldn't believe.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm wondering why I'd care either way.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > Replying wherever the email app happens to leave the cursor
| .. It's antisocial, stupid, and makes the experience much worse
| for everyone.
|
| Bottom posting is even more antisocial if your recipient is
| likely to be using a client that always opens the email with
| only the top visible.
|
| I agree that bottom posting is best but your ire should be
| directed at the makers of the mail clients not the users.
| asimpletune wrote:
| What is bottom posting? Like the ordering of replies?
| jcranmer wrote:
| This is paraphrased from some old Usenet sig lines:
|
| A: Because it messes with the flow of the conversation.
|
| Q: Why is it bad?
|
| A: Posting your reply above the text you are quoting.
|
| Q: What is top-posting?
| CharlesW wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Want to look like a pro in email? Plain text, bottom posted,
| trimmed._
|
| Top posted + interleaved quoting, ya' filthy animals.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Sorry, top posting has won. You are going to reply to a
| business person, and they're going to think you forgot to write
| anything when their own message is at the top.
|
| Also, I like that when I get added to a chain, the entire
| context comes with it. If you trim it, it automatically becomes
| an XY problem to my point of view.
| sph wrote:
| Hi Dave,
|
| My answers below.
|
| > yadda yadda
|
| blah blah
|
| ---
|
| Works like a charm.
|
| Messes up the quotation if some people top-quote and other
| bottom-quote in the same conversation, but do people in 2024
| seriously read the quoted text when every halfway decent
| email client remembers the entire conversation and/or thread?
| Quoted text is noise anyway, especially if coming from laymen
| with Outlook with half a dozen lines of disclaimers, logo and
| signatures repeated and quoted every email.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > do people in 2024 seriously read the quoted text when
| every halfway decent email client remembers the entire
| conversation and/or thread?
|
| Sometimes new people get added onto threads after they've
| been going on for a while, and then those people have to
| read the quoted history to understand the context.
| BadHumans wrote:
| Bottom posting is weird and I hate it.
| wt__ wrote:
| I do a mix of both. Top posting when I'm making a general
| comment, but if I'm responding to several questions, I pare the
| original mail back as much as possible and reply underneath
| each.
|
| My logic is there isn't any benefit to bottom posting if all
| you're doing is making someone scroll.
|
| Also, I refuse to ever use a signature or Out of Office reply.
|
| (Full disclosure: I only use public transport.)
| scblock wrote:
| This may be useful if you're purposely setting up to participate
| somewhere with anachronistic rules, as it gives a nice list of
| clients and configuration settings to get things working.
|
| But for general email communication the ship sailed many years
| ago and most people expect the ability to embed photos, tables,
| lists, and text formatting directly into messages so we can
| better communicate our intent using modern tools, without writing
| 'source code' to do it, even that as simple as Markdown (which is
| based on plain text email conventions). I wouldn't expect
| anything here to gain traction outside of niche communities, and
| the "why plain text is better" section is unconvincing.
| dmwilcox wrote:
| Nit: Mblaze is lovely but it is not a TUI. It's a maildir-enabled
| copy of the "mh" command suite so you can manage and read your
| email from the command line and use your default editor.
|
| Other than that, yes please plaintext. I don't need a shopping
| mall in my inbox, get off my lawn ;)
| skywhopper wrote:
| I agree that plaintext email was better in a lot of ways, but at
| this point, insisting on it will only confuse most
| correspondents. The days of plaintext email are over for all but
| niche use cases. Alas, but there it is.
| malcolmgreaves wrote:
| Any history lessons for why 72 characters is the line length
| limit? For compatibility with printers and old-school terminals,
| I thought a hard limit of less than 80 characters per line was
| the necessary. This not the case? Or is the 72 character limit's
| significance for something different?
| mhd wrote:
| You need to add room for potentially multiple levels of added
| quote marks.
| noizejoy wrote:
| > Any history lessons for why 72 characters is the line length
| limit?
|
| I believe it was punched cards (80 columns total, but 8 of
| those generally used as sequence number).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card
| askonomm wrote:
| So this site wants you to use e-mail in a way that the vast
| majority of people don't use? So if I for some reason even wanted
| to do that, it would break how other people see my emails? This
| makes absolutely no sense, and really comes across as some weird
| mega-nerd swim-against-the-stream-just-because kind of rant.
| jenadine wrote:
| I disagree that plain text "breaks" how other people see your
| emails. Plain text emails look just fine.
| lordgroff wrote:
| But sometimes that's kind of lovely too, it takes all kinds
| after all. It's like using Gopher in 2023 and insisting
| everyone else should too.
| bitwize wrote:
| "Try using a mail client from this century." --the IT guy at a
| former worksite of mine
|
| And yes, top posting has won. When you collaborate with others,
| you communicate on the group's shared terms. For most workgroups
| that means using Outlook's conventions, if not Outlook itself.
| Kerrick wrote:
| There is a great irony in a webpage with a section entitled "Rich
| text isn't that great, anyway" using rich text to set said title
| apart from the surrounding text typographically. The rest of the
| page also makes significant use of hyperlinked text, text with
| background colors, and other useful communication aids that
| aren't possible with plaintext email.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| There is no irony because an email is not a webpage
| jeauxlb wrote:
| It's not that ironic; it's a web page that contains far more
| information that one might expect in any but the largest of
| emails.
|
| The web is where the eyeballs are and nobody's going to
| convince anyone of a new idea by wrapping whole-page content in
| a <pre> tag, no matter the idealological purity this would
| reveal. To reduce friction (already created by telling someone
| to potentially change email clients) with readers the author
| needs to speak the visual language of the medium.
| FiloSottile wrote:
| No, please don't send me emails in a format that will not reflow
| readably on my phone, especially if I didn't use the same format
| when emailing you. (The Fastmail instructions explicitly say to
| disable "When replying, use the same format as the original
| message".)
| Athas wrote:
| That sounds like a bug in your phone. Perhaps you should report
| it to the vendor? Even my ancient Emacs mail reader can reflow
| plain text emails when I ask it to do so. It sometimes needs to
| be told on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, because otherwise it
| might also reflow ASCII art diagrams and such, but in practice
| I find it a minor problem.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I love plaintext email. I always send them and I like getting
| them too. I have Thunderbird configured for displaying email as
| plaintext. HTML emails are ugly.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Learn to let go.
| something98 wrote:
| I try not to let the intrusive thoughts win, but this is
| exactly what I think almost every time there's an article on
| the supposed supriority of emacs or markdown (i.e., plain
| text).
| legitster wrote:
| > In plaintext emails, the URL is always visible, and you can
| more easily make an informed choice to click it. Many phishing
| emails have also taken the step of carefully replicating the
| visual style of an email you might trust, such as the appearance
| of a PayPal email. With plain text, it's much more difficult to
| trick you like this.
|
| This isn't actually true anymore. It's actually pretty hard to
| trick a user and anti-spam software with HTML these days. And
| getting look alike domains is pretty easy. More and more
| successful phishing attacks happen with plaintext emails!
|
| > HTML emails open up a lot of possibilities which are exploited
| by spammers to circumvent spam filters, such as making large
| amounts of text invisible, using hidden elements, and so on. Many
| people discard HTML emails (particularly mailing lists) on the
| simple basis that it dramatically reduces the amount of spam
| emails they receive.
|
| Also not true anymore, at least if you use a service like Yahoo
| or Gmail. If anything, HTML gives Gmail's filters more "clues" as
| to whether something is spam.
| s1mon wrote:
| I was willing to die on this hill for a while, but as others have
| said, that time has unfortunately passed by. The same with top vs
| bottom replies.
|
| Another reason to let go of plain text is that it seems like
| sometimes short plain text emails are more likely to end up in
| spam filters. I don't have great proof of this, but definitely
| have seen it happen.
| wt__ wrote:
| An observation: I switched to mainly reading my email in a text
| client (vi-cmdg, which is a fork of cmdg, a Gmail client that
| uses the API rather than IMAP - the fork has vim keybindings).
|
| I'm finding I can process email quicker and it's less stressful
| than using say Apple Mail, which in turn is always less stressful
| than the Gmail web client.
|
| I _think_ it might be because: - black and white and effectively
| dark mode due to my terminal - much less furniture on the screen
| - not seeing images in the emails (there's a shortcut to render
| stuff with a roughly HTML-equivalent line wrap) - its slightly
| more work to click links (keyboard shortcut which adds numbers
| next to each link for you to press) but that doesn't seem to
| irritate me too much - you get a simple list of attachments - you
| can write replies in Vim, which I quite like
|
| Interested to hear if anyone else is doing this...
| ttunguz wrote:
| I completely agree. I switched to neomutt three or four years
| ago and there are a few things with text-based emails that
| really accelerate my workflow.
|
| 1. Fewer distractions. 2. Scripting keyboard shortcuts through
| emails - creating a to-do from an email with just tapping a
| function key, for example, or adding a company to a CRM with
| another function key tap. 3. Being able to delete emails with a
| Regex filter, which is really important for mailing lists. 4.
| Much faster latency which Though it seems to be trivial
| Google's research has shown is important to great user
| experiences 5. Ability to use neovim within the email client.
| 6. Local search using not much which again much lower latency
| than Google even for very large mailboxes.
| thecosas wrote:
| Anyone know of mobile clients where you can use plaintext?
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > making an accessible HTML email is even more difficult than
| making an accessible website due to the limitations imposed on
| HTML emails by most mail client
|
| FWIW I have a Gmail Add-on that reformats the garbage HTML
| produced by email clients and makes it accessible. (And if you're
| wondering what an add-on is, it's similar to a Chrome extension,
| but without the security risks because the code runs on Google's
| servers rather than in your browser.)
|
| https://prettyfwd.com/
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(page generated 2024-01-17 23:00 UTC)