Use Plaintext Email (2019) (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

I 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.

Why would I limit proper display of my email to 78 character wide monospace devices?

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?

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.

I 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.

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.)

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

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.

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).

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 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

Use plain text websites.

Ugh. 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.

"How about you use a mail client from this century." --the IT guy from a former job

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.

Weird omission of some clients like Thunderbird from the list.