I feel that the folks that do this aren't working for big companies.
In most big companies you can't really afford to do any email client shenanigans. You probably need to see HTML emails, handle calendar invites, etc.
In most big companies you can't really afford to do any email client shenanigans. You probably need to see HTML emails, handle calendar invites, etc.
I think it all depends on which area of work you are in. For software engineering folks it works just fine.
I for one use mutt and handle calendar invites with gcalcli, I can use LDAP lookup and HTML mails are converted using elinks and read inside mutt. If I want to see all the fanciness I just open the text/html attachment in Firefox.
I still use Mutt to quickly prune emails in the AM and for writing to mailing lists.
I've (sadly) gotten pretty used to Outlook and like it quite a bit. I do miss using vim to edit emails though...
> In most big companies you can't really afford to do any email client shenanigans.
So... what does the percentage of employees using Mutt have to do with that?
As for HTML email, what I take from this entire thread is that I either I've been extremely lucky so far or people in general vastly overestimate the importance of it. For one thing, most decent services will send multipart/alternative emails that are suitable for plain text display.
For instance Amazon's emails use rich HTML features, but they also have a text/plain alternative that works perfectly in a text client and carries the same informations. And when there's only HTML the vast majority of the time it's still mostly text with some light styling and it works just fine (sometimes better) in text mode.
The main problem working in big companies and using mutt as my client is that most of the time those systems have a 2nd class non-compliant IMAP servers and you have to go through oops to reliably receive and send your email. I always managed to get it to work after some tweaking though.
The biggest issue with that is when the sender of the email doesn't actually check that the content was converted properly. Most notably, hyperlinks in the HTML get converted to the text of the link and the URL in question is no where to be found.
Even if most HTML emails send perfectly created plaintext versions (and yes, Amazon is great at this), you'll remember the crappy unreadable HTML-only emails far more than the normal looking multipart ones with proper conversion of the HTML to plaintext.
My first job in high school involved formatting and sending out email blasts. Even at that point, I was aware of potential formatting issues and I took care to make sure that the automatically generated plaintext version had all the same content. For that reason, I have no patience for HTML-only emails crafted by grown adults.
Modern shared calendars arguably provide negative value versus simply keeping a private calendar.
At this point, it's pretty rare for me to get an email that I need to read that I can't, mostly those are spam or sales messages. Where I work, the company uses the "G Suite" of products.
At work I use Outlook only for the calendar.