My point, though, is about confirmation bias. Most people don’t know a lot of people who turn on plaintext email as a point of habit.
It might seem like I’m criticizing the guy, but the thing is, there is a very real problem where people are looking at this from their own tech-forward perspective when this is a topic that affects many more people.
Average people tend to use what they have, I have zero "average" friend trying to get more supported features than there currently are.
And, by the way, most of my friends do not use html/CSS directly, or even indirectly use it besides some bold, coloring or the random photo attachment. Zero of them know caniemail.com, and, if they understood the point of it, zero of them would want or need it.
Average people seeing html in their mail doesn't mean they have an opinion on it, or would want more of it if they were told honestly what it does and who abuses it.
For another interesting datapoint: Of the plaintext-only and plaintext-strongly-preferred people I know, somehow almost all of them are German. I wouldn't call them "tech-forward" either, as many of them are specialists in other fields.
...and before the inevitable questioning I'm going to receive: no, I'm not German, and I know more people who aren't, with similar plaintext preferences.
I disagree. I wish I had more people that fit that filter. Email is broken and just a platform for spam. Even if it might be from someone that I purchased something from once or even regularly, if I did not select a check box to opt-in to receiving your email, it is spam.
It's 2024. Emailing large file attachments is about as old and busted as FTP. There are so many other services to "share" large files. Attachment to email was such a kludgy hack in the first place just shows it was only the best worst idea waiting for better solutions. We have them now.
As someone who works very regularly in email, it really bugs me that every time I see a thread about this topic in Hacker News there seems to be this confirmation bias that this is how the average person uses email in the wild, and I’m just trying to make the point that “Hey, this is a strong minority viewpoint.”
I get that y’all don’t like HTML email, but the fact of the matter is, that was a battle lost 25 years ago, and we need to figure out how to keep what we have working for people who don’t even know how to set plaintext email.
By this standard, we should go back to Lynx, because rich web browsers are way more dangerous than this extreme edge case that this guy invented because he doesn’t like HTML email.
First: I run a popular newsletter that uses custom HTML theming and CMS customization. I don’t work in marketing. I just genuinely think HTML in email is actually a value add. Not everyone you disagree with works in marketing.
Secondly: The problem you’re pointing at is bad implementation of standards, which is entirely on Microsoft and Google. (Mostly Microsoft.) The reason HTML doesn’t work well in email is because of bad prioritization, which has led to kludge upon kludge.
> The reason HTML doesn’t work well in email is because of bad prioritization, which has led to kludge upon kludge.
Honestly the main reason is that HTML/CSS expanded well over the creation of documents into the creation of apps. Email content does not really need all of that, it will always only support a subset of that causing confusion.
That said, the lack of standards is definitely the worst aspect of all of this and resulted in the current absolute chaos
A website like this is not required. It's just nice to have. Somehow we've managed to use email without this website it for the decades that email has supported HTML.
Caniuse exists too, does that mean HTML and CSS are broken? Nah, it's just a useful resource to help people decide what tradeoffs to make.
Most people use it in the "bold a few things and make a few words into a link" side of things; more like the old .RTF format. The caniemail.com stuff is for the more complex stuff that might be better left to websites.
> clearly, it's not working if a website like this is even required. you say it is HTML compatible, then continue to tell me things in HTML are not valid for use. you say it can use CSS, then continue to tell me all of the valid CSS that cannot be used. so I'd suggest s/working/working*/ and then define the caveat as required.
That is not the point though.
The point is that the vast majority of people prefer transactional / marketing emails in rich formatting. They understand them better, they prefer interacting with them, it results in a better overall user experience.
Who creates all those transactional / marketing emails in HTML? Developers. Plenty of them.
All of them are in a difficult situation because writing HTML for sucks. It REALLY sucks. Tools like this one help them (the developers!).
Not using HTML emails is not an option in this field. It will never be as long as the average user (AKA the average customer) responds well to rich formatted emails.
I don't reject HTML email, but I always have my client set to read plaintext. 99% of the time, the worst thing that occurs is simply some garbled hyperlinks for a verification email or similar.
Personally, I don't have any need for HTML email in my daily life, and the only emails I occasionally get that are very obviously 'broken' in some way in plaintext mode are usually marketing emails or other messages I don't want to read in the first place.
So, I figure, may as well keep it disabled since plaintext is more consistent and easier to read, and there is significantly less surface area for exploits when you don't need to bundle half a browser to view a couple of paragraphs.
