[sarah180]

> Popular email clients have caused terrible ideas like HTML email to proliferate

Regardless of whether it was a good idea or not, this ship sailed many years ago. In the 21st century, email is rendered in HTML, and nobody but a few engineers would even contemplate taking away the ability to render links, formatting and images in email.

Personally, I would argue that email is on its way out. Personal communications have largely transitioned to things like SMS, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, Twitter, etc. Transactional email notices are increasingly being supplanted by mobile push notifications. Businesses are making heavy use of hybrid push-pull channel systems like Slack.

IMO, the decentralized, federated nature of email was its downfall. It became a cesspool of spams, scams and unwanted notices. The research I've seen strongly suggests that it only takes a small amount of unwanted noise messages for people to go longer between reading email and reduce the amount of email they send.

Of course these are problems that can be solved, but my prediction is that they will be solved by email's successors. Of course, technology predictions are hardly worth the bandwidth that delivers them, but that doesn't stop people from making them. ;-)

[Sir_Cmpwn]

>Regardless of whether it was a good idea or not, this ship sailed many years ago. In the 21st century, email is rendered in HTML, and nobody but a few engineers would even contemplate taking away the ability to render links, formatting and images in email.

git is a tool for engineers. I could reiterate this comment for most of your points. We're not here to debate plaintext email for end-users, we're engineers talking about engineering tools.

[progval]

git is also a tool used by enthusiasts who want to make their first-time contribution to an open source project.

Sadly, centralized web services like GitHub considerably lower the effort needed to do that first contribution.

[Operyl]

I have collaborators who are not necessarily engineers .. we’ve made it easy for them to use git, we really don’t need to be outcasting then because they aren’t an “engineer”.

[Sir_Cmpwn]

Then this workflow doesn't work for those groups. So what? It works for many others.

[jedberg]

I think you may be right about the downfall of personal emails, but email still has a strong place in business. I still find it the best way to have a long discussion with thoughtful responses, especially if it's tied to a newsgroup system (a la Google Groups and it's email gateway). It's still far superior to Slack et al for that kind of thing.

Also, incidentally to your point, it's a lot easier to control spam within a company email system. As a broad brush, you can just set your client to automatically relegate any email from outside your organization to another folder.

[progval]

> nobody but a few engineers would even contemplate taking away the ability to render links, formatting and images in email.

Email clients, like Thunderbird, do can render links and formatting in plain text emails