[busterarm]

Gmail doesn't play well with plain text emails.

Even if you manually select Plain Text to send, it still reflows lines at 78 characters by manually inserting linebreaks and adds its own special characters where it feels like. It also doesn't follow a handful of RFCs specific to email. There is no workaround for the forced hard-wrapping of lines in Plain Text. It will not let you use format=flowed either.

Plain Text mode has been obviously unusable for a long time, and the only folks who ever really bothered to complain about it were kernel developers (the mailing list requires plain text). Nobody else cares, but they should. Go figure.

If you're using a 'modern' mail client, you don't notice this. If you're using old, tried and true technology, the problems are plain as day.

Gmail broke email.

[dahauns]

Heh, yes - they are basically the heir to Outlook, which ironically does play well with plaintext email nowadays...

[busterarm]

Tangentially, think of all of the wasted bits sent in the multipart section of the email (often 2-5x longer than the text itself) just because HTML is the default...

[jon_richards]

I get furious that it threads conversations automatically instead of with the "reply-to" built into the email protocol.

It usually just threads emails with the same subject, but...

It sometimes doesn't thread emails with the same subject, but after someone else has replied to the first one. You have to put "Re:" in the second email, since the reply automatically added "Re:" and I guess that's too different for gmail to accept, yet...

If you try to separate your emails by environment, a completely keyword in the subject often isn't enough to stop the emails from threading.

Even if you filter and label your email by the subject lines, emails that get threaded together get all labels.

You can't even give gmail feedback like "This email does not belong in this thread". The only options are to accept their threading or turn off threading entirely.

[leephillips]

Another option is to use a non-broken email client, like mutt.

[jon_richards]

I'm the one sending the emails, but lots of people receive them. Can't have them all switch.

[leephillips]

It seemed as if your complaint about incorrect threading was about the client, hence my suggestion to use a better client. Are you saying that if people reply using the gmail client the reply-to header is wrong? Then yes, using mutt will not fix this.

[jon_richards]

No, the issue is that I care about how my automated emails appear in other people's clients. I'm like a web developer complaining about having to support internet explorer.