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Comment by hota_mazi | Hacker News Reader

> HTML emails are an abomanation.

They're a life saver. This is 2017, the least we can ask is that people take the time to use bold, italics, bullet points, tables, hyperlinks, and type faces to make their communications more cogent.

If you mean that "abuse of HTML" is an abomination, then yes, sure. But light use of HTML is extremely important today and my opinion of someone trying to communicate an important piece of information to me is directly related to how much care they have put into composing their email.

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I disagree, not even bold face is needed for effective communication. Besides, if you send me a mail with all these features, it will either not be displayed at all by my mail program, or as garbage, or, if you're lucky, as plaintext.

But a markdown formatter that sends the plaintext part as markdown seems like the perfect solution for both worlds. I don't mind reading markdown, it's designed for being readable, and I also write it often.

The are plenty of good mua that display html emails well though, so it sounds like your choice to avoid receiving them properly; a choice you're entitled to but not an argument against allowing visually formatting and graphics in emails.

Of course it's my choice,and I've also set up clawsmail to display HTML mail by the press of a button. The point is that I'm not the only one. With plaintext mail you can reach everyone, with HTML mail only a fraction of that.

If you send HTML mails, they're simply more likely to land in the spam folder, where 80% of all HTML mails belong.

>With plaintext mail you can reach everyone, with HTML mail only a fraction of that. //

Any stats on that? I'd reckon you're in 5x9s territory for those that are reachable by HTML mail (vs. plaintext). Also I don't know about other mail clients but Thunderbird has a setting to send HTML email in plaintext too, choose your poison.

For me text based emails are far less common and are more often than not "Hi, my name Lena, I saw your info on Facebook and want to know you well [...]". Indeed the only non-spam plaintext emails I can recall are dev mailing list mails.

The thing about HTML emails is, different email clients support different things.

It's not HTML5 at all. If you want to do layouts, you must use tables. There are hacky things you have to do to display things correctly across all different types of clients.

You have tools like this: https://buttons.cm/ which generate abominable code for the sake of compatibility.

Also, Outlook uses the Word rendering engine to process HTML. It's janky, at best.

It's that supposed to be an argument against HTML emails? That some companies choose not to implement it for compatibility? Like, let's stop printing because companies are making proprietary cartridges and breaking compatibility??

Not some companies. All companies, including Google for Gmail, Yahoo for Yahoo mail, Microsoft for Outlook, etc have very limited support for HTML in their HTML rendering engines.

Instead of using floats and margins, you have to revert to using <table> for layouts. Otherwise, your emails just won't render correctly, much of the time.

It's not possible to support HTML fully in Webmail clients, either. Even without scripting, you could write an HTML email that overlays a malicious button on top of Gmail's web interface itself, and it would be too easy to phish people.

That's a confused message you're giving: you don't want the ability to put an ordered list and an image in an email because you can't get pixel-perfect rendering with the (a!) full HTML spec?

And yet HN doesn't support bold, bullet points, tables, and type faces and we communicate just fine.

YAGNI.

Walking moves you from place to place, yet some people like vehicles ...

Just because we communicate just fine doesn't mean we couldn't communicate better. We communicate just fine with no punctuation and spelling mistakes, does that mean it's a good idea?

Bold, italics, lists and particularly, code snippets and verbatim text would make HN a lot easier to follow.

HN already can show (non-highlighted) code snippets

  like such

and it's a pain in the ass for anyone reading in small screens.

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