

Did we forget about HTML-emails? - jarquesp
http://b.jarqu.es/post/6768002849

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city41
I very strongly do not want HTML email to come back. I consider the dominance
of plaintext email to be a victory, let's not concede it. HTML email was quite
popular in the mid to late nineties and it was a disaster. Why do we want
messages to go from 600 bytes to 30k? Why do we want readability of the
message to be determined by either the sender's sense of design and/or our
client's capabilities? Why do we want to make email threads that much more
difficult to to create and follow? It's bad enough we've succumbed to top
posting, I can't even imagine what the size and readability of an HTML email
that has been replied to 20+ times would be. Please, let's stick with
plaintext.

~~~
jarin
While we're at it let's get rid of streaming HD video and all that cumbersome
CSS and Javascript (it just slows down page load times, and why should
websites be dictated by the owner's sense of design?).

~~~
city41
The website analogy is pretty poor. How many websites today aren't designed by
professional designers?

When you hand the design reins to everyone, you end up with Myspace profiles
and Geocities sites. There's nothing wrong with either of those, but context
is essential. When I'm reading through dozens and even hundreds of emails a
day that are crucial to my daily work, I really don't want to have to deal
with Paula's pink hearts theme or Bill's Boston Bruins theme. There's a time
and place for everything. I do want confidence that I can read my emails
quickly and easily, and plaintext makes that promise a lot better than HTML
does.

~~~
jarin
That's exactly the reason emails come in two parts (text and HTML). You can
tell your client to only show plaintext emails if you're so inclined (just
like you can tell Firefox to only use your own personal stylesheet).

Personally, I prefer the HTML emails and find them faster to go through. It
takes me about 2 seconds to skim a Thinkgeek mailer with product images and
see if there's anything interesting, vs. having to actually read the entire
email and click a bunch of links.

Then there are all the nice graphs and colors in the server monitoring emails
I get that let me get a big picture overview of the server farm health at a
glance every week. If I see any red or too many spikes, I can decide whether
to investigate further or get back to coding.

For all the benefits I get from HTML email, I'll risk the small chance that
getting an email with Paula's pink hearts theme will seriously fuck up my day.

~~~
city41
Not all HTML messages include a text section. I just looked at the raw message
of 6 HTML emails and only two of them had multipart/alternative sections. But
if it could be agreed upon to always send both, I think that would be good.

And for sure, you do make some good points on where HTML email can be a good
thing. Perhaps I'm being too pessimistic.

~~~
deadcyclo
That's my beef with them too. I prefer text emails, since I do a lot of my
email reading on the CLI. It's true, and annoying, that a fair amount don't
include multipart/alternative sections. For me it's not a huge problem as I
have plugins that will extract the text from the HTML and present the text
only, but it's not exactly a great reader experience.

Much much worse, however, are all of the people/companies that include
multipart/alternative sections, but do it completely wrong: "This is an HTML-
email. Your client lacks HTML support. Please visit [url here] to view this
email" or even worse "This is an HTML-email. Your client lacks HTML support.
Please upgrade your software".

I come across these almost daily, and it bugs the hell out of me. Unless it is
something very important (bill, sign-up email, etc.) I simply ignore these
emails, and they never get read. (Yes, it really is out of spite. I'll ignore
them when reading email in a web client or on my phone later. They simply lost
their chance)

I don't really like HTML mail, but I can live with it. I see the reason why it
exists (great for advertisement). However, if you use HTML email, do include
multipart/alternative section for non-HTML clients, and include the same
information there, non of this "your client can't handle HTML, you loose
crap".

~~~
jarin
It's actually a pretty bad idea to use multipart in that way anyway, as having
very different html and plain text content in your email is a flag for spam
filters.

------
Slackwise
You can't really call it HTML if it's so wildly nonstandard.

Personally, I think we need "Markdown Email". It looks great in plain text,
and something like an end user custom stylesheet could render it pretty-fied
for those that care.

Wishful thinking, sadly.

~~~
seats
I like this idea a lot.

Also something that would help would be an ignore based backward compatibility
standard. Like how browsers ignore tags they don't understand, then you could
send a markdown formatted message that is marked in a way that the alternative
non markdown text-only version is used by older clients.

~~~
jarin
You can already use the multipart/alternative MIME type for that (which is
what HTML emails use), it's just a matter of email clients deciding that
they'll show a Content-Type other than text/html if it exists.

For example, you could use just a plain text part and a multipart/alternative
with a text/markdown Content-Type. The email client would render Markdown if
it's capable of handling it, and the plain text version if not.

------
alanfalcon
HTML mailers were the bane of my existence in my previous job. I'd finally get
everything looking right in all my tests and then our third party testing
service would come back with some obscure spacing issue in Windows Live Mail,
or Eudora, or Outlook 2007, and I'd spend the rest of the day coming up with
fixes that wouldn't break something somewhere else.

As long as Microsoft continues to use the MS Word Rendering Engine to display
e-mail in Outlook, it won't matter what kinds of standards work is attempted
in the HTML e-mail space ... and even if they change, it's not like all those
old Outlook clients will go away for a while.

------
mikeryan
The reason people moved away from them is that a few bad apples were tracking
emails via logged images. Then you got the images stripped which made the
whole thing kind of pointless. Not to mention the fact that there's the actual
HTML engine rendering mess.

HTML email sounds good on paper (and to marketers) but the reality is that its
a nightmare.

~~~
ryan_brunner
A _few_ bad apples _were_? Image based e-mail tracking is de rigeur to this
day for nearly any marketing e-mail you receive, and has been since e-mail
marketing has been a thing.

Any e-mail marketing provider worth their salt will include these without even
asking the person sending the batch.

~~~
yuhong
So much that most email clients disable images by default and have been for
years to help prevent abuse by spam.

~~~
Jach
And if it's actually important or you're curious or you can't read it and want
to know what it says, you'll click the "show images" button. Email tracking is
hardly a bad thing, it provides useful data. Some address never reading
emails/never showing pictures? Stop sending them stuff.

------
mnutt
> You can’t allow some arbitrary code to run in the user’s mail client, we
> already have enough security problems in emails.

Webmail aside, what are the security implications of running javascript in an
email client? Any reason why they're worse than going to a web page?

(You might say you choose which web pages you go to, whereas email gets sent
to you. But with all the 3rd-party advertising javascript, you end up running
a lot of arbitrary code while browsing)

~~~
jarin
Email clients shouldn't be more vulnerable than browsers these days, since I
think most email clients use a browser rendering engine for HTML emails now
anyway.

There is always the risk of another WMF-style exploit though.

------
quinndupont
It really is surprising, especially how sophisticated the email specification
is (since it had to deal with gateways and multiple non-Internet networks,
etc.). But, perhaps history has something of an answer here: it took email
decades to work out how to handle multimedia, with all sorts of false starts
and poor standards, so, perhaps HTML email is really just the continuation of
this?

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brendoncrawford
_> Gone are the days of ugly plain text and we celebrate the arrival of
beautiful emails._

The point of email is to read and understand information QUICKLY. Plain text
allows one to do just that. If you are trying to make email an artistic
masterpiece, you are missing the point.

------
teilo
In my ideal world, all email clients capable of displaying "rich text" would
support Markdown, with an X-header identifying the plain-text message as such.

------
vch
why does someone need html email anyway? say it in plain text and if that's
not possible just stick in a url. And you get to actually track it easily too.

~~~
ryan_brunner
You could apply the same argument to webpages. I think HTML e-mail is a
complete mess right now, but allowing some degree of e-mail styling does go a
long way in helping users understand what the e-mail is trying to convey.

Something as simple as laying out tabluar data in a table is extremely hard to
pull off effectively with a plain-text e-mail.

~~~
duck
Exactly. For my Hacker Newsletter project I have a real hard time putting in
all the links (one to the article, one to the comments) in text mode, but HTML
makes this easy for users to scan and use.

