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Do you apply an extreme minimalist styling to other areas of your daily life - like "there's no need to clothes to be any other colour than gray"? or "there's no need for food to have a flavour as long as it's nutritious".

Genuine question.

Most people use some form of flourish even in handwriting - an underline, all-caps, increased letter size or spacing, a personally preferred colour; isn't it weird to not have the facility for that in email?




I looked down and I am indeed wearing a plain grey t-shirt. I wouldn't tell people to not wear anything other than gray though. I wouldn't tell people to not eat food and switch to soylent completely. I'm sorry if I appeared to push my viewpoint. That was not my intention. I apologize for my lack of communication skills. I was merely expressing a personal preference.

I just wonder why documents that need rich text formatting can't be sent as an attachment instead.


I don't know about you, but I write a lot of emails, and I write very long emails, usually to technical people, and believe or not, they don't read everything and they have TL;DR mentality (I don't, I read every word). I also deal with business users in my role, and rich text formatting improves reading when rich text is used appropriately. Compile PDF and upload is just another burden, and sometimes I forget to forward / reply with the attachment there. Wait I want to show table directly on my email (not ascii kind).. that can't be done if you are plaintext.

I don't remember if Gmail's integration with Google Docs actually suppose to make links available during reply/forward...


Don't MUA handle sending both plaintext and HTML well enough? Thunderbird seems to cope with that at least.

I think there is a tendency for minimalists to feel that others should conform to[wards] their ideal, whilst there are many aesthetics and there doesn't appear to be a logical reason to choose one above another [in the general case] - one man's cluttered is another's functional, or whatever.

Way back in KDE3 days I was looking for a MUA to move to from Opera Mail and was auditioning KMail, the devs insisted that the display should not be allowed to handle sending HTML emails as a matter of principle. Since then it's been a bit of a touchy subject for me ...




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