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Use Plaintext Email (2019)
- mattl 1y agoWeird omission of some clients like Thunderbird from the list.
- miles 1y agohttps://useplaintext.email/#thunderbird https://useplaintext.email/#thunderbird
- mattl 1y agoYet 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.
- zahlman 1y agoThe 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.
- mattl 1y agoI don't really understand how people are checking their email without configuring an email client, but then I realized I don't care and once again I should just never interact with anything from sr.ht
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- daneel_w 1y agoGiven the unfathomably bloated mess the desktop issue has become it doesn't entirely belong in the list of recommended clients.
- mattl 1y agoThere’s no other cross platform GUI client I can think of.
- daneel_w 1y agoClaws and Sylpheed come to mind.
- mattl 1y ago* https://www.claws-mail.org/downloads.php https://www.claws-mail.org/downloads.php * https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/download.html https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/download.html Compare those to https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/all https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/all I can't find a current download for modern macOS on either of the first two
- daneel_w 1y agohttps://brew.sh/ https://brew.sh/
- mattl 1y agoShouldn't need Homebrew to install a GUI email client. Really shouldn't need to explain that, IMO.
- daneel_w 1y agoHas the goal post been moved enough now? The author shouldn't need to explain why a 350 MiB monster like Thunderbird isn't in their list of recommended options for making the move to basic plain-text email.
- johnklos 1y agoThunderbird is basically a web browser that executes whatever you want it to.
- linhns 1y agoIntentional or not, good omission though.
- SoftTalker 1y agoWhile 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).
- dsr_ 1y agoI have not had problems doing it for the last 35 years, so if you are using terrible tools, you should probably fix that.
- SoftTalker 1y agoYou 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.
- leakycap 1y agoModern 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.
- F3nd0 1y agoA possible work-around that comes to mind is always prefixing your reply with some form of ‘(reply below)’.
- 1y ago
- beached_whale 1y agoAnother 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.
- mike-cardwell 1y agoAnd use https://www.emailprivacytester.com https://www.emailprivacytester.com to test that your email client is configured correctly
- beached_whale 1y agoERR connection refused like error. I guess gmail doesn't like them
- mike-cardwell 1y agoSorry about that. Try again now
- lovetox 1y agoAlso does not work with fastmail.com adresses
- mike-cardwell 1y agoWas a local error. Fixed now
- DavideNL 1y ago> fastmail.com adresses Curious, what was the result for fastmail.com addresses ?
- xyst 1y agoWhat’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.
- geor9e 1y agoSwitch 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.
- leakycap 1y ago> 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.
- wazoox 1y agoBut I don't have Facebook. The worst is the incessant "call me back on WhatsApp". I don't use any of this crap.
- Fogest 1y agoI 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.
- sneak 1y agoI 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.
- kevincox 1y agoYeah, 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.
- pomatic 1y agoI'm sure markdown email has been done? But just didn't gain traction?
- jaffa2 1y agoMailmate 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.
- colonial 1y agoGNOME Evolution supports Markdown natively (I believe either raw or rendered to HTML on send; I use the latter.)
- Avamander 1y agoThere's no The Markdown that's standardised (or safe enough), that it could be implemented like that unfortunately.
- zahlman 1y agoFor 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.)
- kelnos 1y agoI 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.
- 1y ago
- F3nd0 1y agoThe 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.
- layer8 1y agoWith 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 https://vimhelp.org/change.txt.html#formatting
- Avamander 1y agoThis is kinda why "format=flowed" exists, if things fit on the screen, even deeply nested quotes remain readable if there's enough space. And vice versa, people on their phones can still read the text, albeit still to the extent that things can fit. No weird hard wrapping or stray words that could've fit at least.
- nailer 1y agoWhy would I limit proper display of my email to 78 character wide monospace devices?
- skydhash 1y agoI think mobile viewing and most marketing email is around that limit. So not really a hard choice to make.
- Avamander 1y agoMobile is often less than that and any hard wrapping looks absolutely horrid. I mean, hard wrapping in general looks disgusting on anything besides an ancient VT-80, but it looks extra bad on mobile. Only tolerable option for plain text is "format=flowed".
- skydhash 1y agoHard wrapping is nice. My screen is too large for any kind of flowed text so I often have to add the extra margin that is required to get back between 80 and 120 characters. On mobile, you can just rotate the phone.
- jcgl 1y agoSounds like you need a client whose width can be configured. Rather than imposing arbitrary, non-semantic formatting on all messages.
- Avamander 1y agoI've had autorotation turned off for a decade, I'm not turning it on for your email. It's a bit odd that plain text proponents don't want HTML imposed on them but are okay with imposing this.
- nailer 1y agoiPhone and the most popular android devices are much less.
- alkonaut 1y agoHard 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).
- Rotundo 1y agoI 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.
- rsync 1y agoBoth you, and your parent, should consider changing your view in favor of Postel's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle "... be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept ..."
- alkonaut 1y agoI don’t see how that applies to be honest. The default has changed to html a long time ago and that’s what people expect. What would be great would be if clients detected when I send an email with only text and just chose to format it as plaintext then BUT importantly, that th e reverse happens in the reading client: it formats it the same regardless, so my text email doesn’t look strange. Needs to render with the same font etc. it almost never happens that I send a plain text email though since my org like so many prescribes the use of an image as signature. Not to mention that 9 emails out of 10 contains other images anyway.
- wazoox 1y agoI 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.
- bitwize 1y ago"How about you use a mail client from this century." --the IT guy from a former job
- tonymet 1y agoi 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 https://github.com/tonymet/restmail
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoSome previous discussions: 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39033046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39033046 2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32810515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32810515 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20513987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20513987
- rsync 1y agoI 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.
- layer8 1y agoSimilar 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.
- zzo38computer 1y ago> 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. I have received some messages that don't, but in some cases the HTML is written clearly so that the message is still easily readable despite that.
- dsp_person 1y agoI 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 https://github.com/akissinger/dodo
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_ribbon_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_ribbon_campaign
- layer8 1y agoExcept that “plain text” is more general than ASCII.
- zzo38computer 1y agoYes, although often ASCII will be suitable. (Sometimes, other character sets are helpful, though.)
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoASCII is always plaintext. But plaintext may not always be ASCII. Campaign started in 1998. How common was non-ASCII plaintext in 1998.
- colonial 1y agoComposing 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.
- pbronez 1y agoI wish we could all just agree on markdown.
- mcv 1y agoWhile 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?
- Avamander 1y agoIt does not and it's tedious when people do so unconditionally. I've seen systems not even accept multipart/alternative and it's just wack.
- zzo38computer 1y agoI use Heirloom-mailx, which is not listed there. It uses bottom posting, and has no support for HTML. The recommendations they mention are good ideas, although I might also add a few more: - Allow the sender to prefer purely ASCII when applicable. (ASCII should not be mandatory (since you may want or need to use other character sets for other languages), although it should be possible to prefer it. This can also improve compatibility with the receiver.) - When forwarding or replying to a plain text message, the reply should also be plain text by default. - When the author of a message attaches a picture to a message and includes it inline in the HTML message, use a placeholder when converting it to plain text to make it clear to the receiver that there is a picture attached. - Allow signatures to be disabled, and if a signature is added, then in the plain text format it should precede the signature by a line with two hyphens and one space.
- binary132 1y agoUse plain text websites.
- matty22 1y agoI work for one of those “evil” email software companies. Part of our business is external marketing and the much larger part of our business is internal employee communications. For over 15 years we kept track of the number of people who used HTML emails and the number of people who opted for plain text emails. It was something in the realm of 0.1% of all mail recipients had opted for plain text. That was in 2015. Today, that number would probably be even lower. So we stopped offering multipart emails entirely because the cost/benefit analysis doesn’t add up. HTML emails aren’t sent only because that’s what the senders want. They are sent because that’s what the recipients want.
- spauldo 1y agoUgh. It's weird because on the one hand, I'd love a text-only email world. On the other hand, I wish people would just admit defeat. We lost. HTML email is the norm. We need to accept it and move on. Attitudes like this are what hold back a lot of the traditional email clients. Instead of just supporting text and claiming that's how the Internet should be, they should be adding HTML support so they can talk to 99% of email users out there. It's not like we don't know how to render HTML in a terminal. I want to use Emacs for mail. I use it for everything else. I use Outlook because I need to see the rendered HTML my coworkers and vendors send me. And as long as people are sticking to this idea that email can only ever be text, I'll be stuck using Microsoft's brain-dead idea of what an email client should be.