[proactivesvcs]

Over 99.5% of the email I receive is either plaintext or renders perfectly legible in plain. This suggests that a large fraction of newsletters are already plaintext. The mail client is primarily a program to display and send email. The web browser is a web browser.

If the user wants safety, switching to plaintext is a very wide step forward.

[alkonaut]

> Over 99.5% of the email I receive is either plaintext or renders perfectly legible in plain.

Is that representative? Where do you get email from? Did you change preferences on things like mailing lists in order to get to that percentage?

Also: what kind of client do you use? iOS mail does send plain text emails as text/plain (which is fantastic) but if you look at e.g. inbox (gmail) it doesn't even allow sending plain text emails as far as I'm aware.

[ryanbrunner]

Emails can send in both formats for a single message, so it's possible and even likely that most mailing lists, etc. he receives send in both formats. In my experience, even most marketing e-mails are at least somewhat good about this. I'm 99% sure that Gmail will still send a plaintext e-mail inferred from your HTML content whenever you send, so it's not quite accurate to say it doesn't send in plaintext.

[alkonaut]

> I'm 99% sure that Gmail will still send a plaintext e-mail inferred from your HTML content whenever you send, so it's not quite accurate to say it doesn't send in plaintext.

I think that might be possible in the "old" gmail, I was referring to their newer "Inbox by gmail" client. I believe it never sends a text/plain email regardless of content (And it being their "newer" revamped client kind of shows what googles take on this is...)

[cozzyd]

I checked and, at least for a plaintext mesdage, Gmail on Android sends both plain text and HTML.

[alkonaut]

"gmail" and "inbox by gmail" are two different apps (on all platforms)

[proactivesvcs]

...and if you're PayPal or eBay, you offer the customer a choice of receiving plain text emails. Then you send them multipart emails with a blank text/plain part.

Not that this surprises me in the least :-)

[proactivesvcs]

I run two email addresses: one business, one personal. As you may imagine, the emails I get between the two are quite different. I'm using Thunderbird and always, when given the choice, opt for plain text email. I find Thunderbird does a very good job of rendering HTML email legible (easy to read) and functional (links work, etc).

Perhaps once a month, maybe less, I have to use the toolbar button "Show HTML Temp" to do a one-off rendering of an email as basic HTML. Almost always the same offenders.

I find it such a success that I recommend it to my customers - none of which are computer experts, and most are not what I'd call "computer savvy". A process has to meet a high bar for me to recommend something like this to my customers.

Shame that when I explain how it can help in improving one's security that a vanishingly-small number of customers take me up on the offer!

[alkonaut]

I think the first reason people don't care for installing e.g. Thunderbird is that they check mail on a) mobile, b) work (which is usually outlook, or at least mandated by someone else).

If I asked 100 friends "did you use email today" 99 would say yes. If I said "did you do it on a computer" then 50 would say yes (those that work at an office). If I said "was it your own computer" then maybe 1 would say yes.

I think for us that sit at our own computers regularly, it's hard to imagine just how extremely rare it is for people to actually use desktop/laptops for personal use these days.