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The author hasn't made a case for why he needs to send plain text emails. Every mail client - including text mode ones like Pine - supports HTML formatted emai
by quasque 12y ago
The author hasn't made a case for why he needs to send plain text emails.
Every mail client - including text mode ones like Pine - supports HTML formatted emails, even if they end up displaying them without formatting.
- ekmartin 12y agoA lot of mailing lists require you to send plain text emails, with the Linux Kernel being an example.
- ZirconCode 12y agoyou beat me to it by a minute ;)
- TorKlingberg 12y agoDon't those mailing lists also require line wrapping?
- 4ad 12y agoThey require sensible line wrapping. Line wrapping text is good, even required for commit messages, but line wrapping git patches is obviously a catastrophe. On Gmail you can't turn wrapping off (and you can't send patches anyway as it elides leading indentation and changes tabs to spaces).
- ZirconCode 12y agoMany mailing lists only accept plaintext. It's a common standard in older communities (ex. linux).
- quasque 12y agoSeems a rather archaic requirement to be imposing on one's users, but thanks for clarifying!
- Pacabel 12y agoMost of the emails I send contain no formatting whatsoever, except for indentation, paragraphs and other formatting that can be represented just fine using plain text. Why should I wastefully send unneeded markup that inflates the size of my email several times larger than what's actually needed?
- quasque 12y agoI don't think that is a very good argument in these modern times, with the relatively huge storage and bandwidth availability. The extra size of such formatting markup is negligible.
- claudius 12y agoChecking my mail archive, the HTML part of multipart messages is on average 5 to 10 times larger than the plaintext part. Such a factor is essentially never irrelevant, even with decently fast connections it often takes me a minute or so to download a day’s worth of e.g. debian-user messages. Similarly, I’d be quite annoyed if my local IMAP cache took five to ten times as much space than it does at the moment for no reason whatsoever (other than filling up an extra 8 to 18 GB).
- quasque 12y agoThis preference is based on the assumption that the extra information conveyed in the HTML part of the email is worthless, which may not be the case. I can see from the downvotes that some HN users are excessively passionate about their plain text emails, but many people do prefer the extra formatting and layout that a well-constructed HTML email can provide. This can be observed in general by the fact that almost everyone uses web browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome - rather than Lynx.
- manicdee 12y agoI've yet to see a "well constructed" HTML email that was sent by a human as part of an email conversation. I've seen plenty of poorly constructed HTML emails sent by people who decided that since they can have twelve different fonts in five sentences, with italics, bold, outline, underline and strikethrough thrown in, they should do so. It's almost like they have set themselves a challenge to use every feature of their email client in every message. Plain text, on the other hand, always looks sensible, well-formed and well constructed to me. This leaves it to the sender to write something worth the effort of reading.
- ape4 12y agoBecause plaintext is nice and simple.