Yeah. Sadly, plain text email seems to be endangered species. But perhaps there is still hope, markdown and pals have made some inroads as all around useful document formats.
I know this is an extreme but I like this extreme.
When I say plain text, I mean plain-text. I mean not even markdown. Just plain text. The client can choose to make links clickable if they like.
Any formatted document should come as an attachment (I'd prefer PDF). I guess it should be an attachment I expect or I probably wouldn't open it. In any case, I don't like emails with tracking. It feels forced. If you really care, send delivery and read receipt requests but I doubt we do.
Markdown should stay where it belongs. It should convert into HTML in the server, not on my client.
For the first few years that I used gmail, I was set up to use plain text with the terminal theme. Why? It was the only theme that I could find that had a fixed width font, and I read enough emails with cut and pasted code that I wanted a fixed width font.
They took that option away from me in 2011. No, I don't care about a picture. All I wanted was fixed width font, and plain text. Yes, I could apply style sheets to read plain text, and they would eventually break them for me. I'm not bothering with an uphill battle to get it back. I'm just moving on.
Oh, and about rich text? If I happen to be cutting and pasting something that was bold over here, I usually don't want it bold in my email! In fact I've wanted that approximately 0 times in my life. And it is a very good approximation.
I'm with you on this one, though I didn't realise we were extreme!
Plain text cuts all the cruft and I can reasonably expect emails I receive to largely look similar so I get good at extracting relevant information.
Every client I have, desktop and mobile, displays and sends in plain text only and I'm pleasantly surprised how infrequently this breaks anything completely and how often it exposes tracking links etc.
While rich/styled text would be useful in many situations, I'd rather strive for simplicity. With Unicode, plain text is already complicated as it is and the diversity in email client software means that plain-text is probably our best bet. As far as I know, most office emails are pretty much like text messages anyways. Also, it is possible to leave stylistic/visual cues in a plain-text email such as Important (: Not really sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing to write like this...
If we must track users, perhaps we can just give them a link they can visit?
What do you think about using attachments for documents where formatting is essential?
I was not aware of that. Sorry. I just meant that if we want to send a document that should look exactly as we send it, perhaps we should consider sending a PDF document or something.
Something I found interesting in the Wikipedia MIME article is:
If I so much as write க in Tamil, I rely on MIME. (Sorry if this is obvious to readers. I am not an email expert.) For others like me, the Wikipedia article on email spells it out:
> Originally an ASCII text-only communications medium, Internet email was extended by Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) to carry text in other character sets and multi-media content attachments. International email, with internationalized email addresses using UTF-8, has been standardized, but not yet widely adopted.
Outlook formats plain text email with a square monospaced system font, making the rest of the world look retarded. The favour is reciporcal, because, as a gmail user, Outlook-sent emails often have this delightful pastel cyan rounded font, making them look like kindergarten artifacts.
When I say plain text, I mean plain-text. I mean not even markdown. Just plain text. The client can choose to make links clickable if they like.
Any formatted document should come as an attachment (I'd prefer PDF). I guess it should be an attachment I expect or I probably wouldn't open it. In any case, I don't like emails with tracking. It feels forced. If you really care, send delivery and read receipt requests but I doubt we do.
Markdown should stay where it belongs. It should convert into HTML in the server, not on my client.