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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

In Fastmail’s webmail:

Settings → Preferences → Show advanced preferences → Reading → View HTML, select Always display messages in plain text.

Settings → Preferences → Show advanced preferences → Compose & Reply → Compose format, select Plain text, plus untick When replying, use the same format as the original message.

I don’t think this is such a rare feature, though it’s generally not made obvious at least.

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Sorry, I suppose I wasn’t very clear. I do this through Posteo and Tutanota already (though perhaps you could sell me on Fastmail with your insider knowledge ;).

What I mean is I wish companies would send their transactional emails and newsletters in plaintext. Images and the like could be sent as attachments, as opposed to creepy weblinks that track your opens and IP and everything.

I would pay each company $0.10 if they offered me the option of receiving all their emails in plaintext like this.

They'd probably make less money if you paid them, that's the problem.

And you'd also need to be able to somehow force them to <<only>> monetize you through direct payment, because what most companies do is, take your money <<and>> also sell your data, on top of that.

If you hang out on HN a lot, I can see how you might think “most companies” are selling your data.

But this is hilariously false. Nowhere near “most” companies are selling your data.

In fact, an overwhelmingly vast majority of all businesses don’t sell your data. This is true inside Silicon Valley and even more true outside of the Valley.

Even in Silicon Valley, most companies understand that selling products and services to customers is more profitable than trashing a customer relationship by selling a customer’s personal info to third parties.

They don't sell it. But they entrust a lot of it to disreputable 3rd parties, who exist to track me all over the internet and then try to show me ads.

But possibly only because they haven't yet added 'tech' to the hip abbreviation of their industry, and realised that data is valuable, possibly more valuable than whatever their actual business is?

I think people use 'selling my data' as an (inaccurate, sure) shorthand for 'collecting so much data about me and I don't really trust them not to sell it at some point'.

Handing it over during company acquisition is a form of sale.

I used to think that was true. But these days, I think a huge portion of companies are placing advertising or user tracking software on their websites produced by advertisers or user tracking vendors who DO capture and sell the data.

You nailed it. Since the original post is about email, I'll use LiveIntent as an example. Does the New York Times sell my personal data? Maybe, but not egregiously. But they use LiveIntent ad tags in their emails, and those tags leak a ton of data.

> In fact, an overwhelmingly vast majority of all businesses don’t sell your data.

That's because they haven't figured out how to. Or at least how to do it to make it worthwhile.

Almost every mom-and-pop store sells your data to Facebook & co. That's what those fidelity cards are for. I didn't realize that either, until recently.

Secondly, we're all doomed. I recently read an article about Amazon's ad division being as big as AWS and growing as fast, if not faster:

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/3/14/do-amazon-...

If even AWS isn't bigger and isn't growing faster than ads, what hope is there, really, for someone trying to just sell stuff?

Maybe not directly, but a huge number of companies use tools that involve data selling, even if the company doesn't realize it. Once a marketing guy sent me a LinkedIn tracking tag to put on our website for conversion tracking. It quickly became clear he didn't know anything about what LinkedIn would do with the information. I think that stuff happens all the time.

Until recently, I worked for a company that published email newsletters and they still sent a text version along with HTML. It started back in the Blackberry days and continued because we thought it made our emails look more credible for corporate email filters.

That's about three levels deeper than most users are comfortable navigating, and as such only a negligible fraction of users will ever see this setting, understand what it does, and change it. Too bad every enterprise solution defaults to HTML anyway.

I wrote out the full path to it, but Preferences is the default page in Settings, and Reading and Compose & Reply are just sections inside it. So it’s actually more like “go to Settings, click Show advanced preferences at the bottom of the page, and search for ‘plain’”. And yeah, it is an advanced preference, whether you’d prefer otherwise or not.

Only a negligible fraction of users care about this feature and it only needs to be toggled once so it's clearly in the right place.

Most users probably don't care about HTML versus plaintext emails. The ones that do care would be the ones willing to pay $0.10 extra per month to enforce plaintext receipt, or willing to dig through a few levels of configuration to enable plaintext receipt.

TricepMail has granular/heritable switching between plain text or HTML, with or without images. For example, if you have a mailbox set to plain text but receive an email that you would like to render as HTML, it's just one click away for either the entire thread or just that message.

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