[zoom6628]

Html email is a pox. I set my email clients to use RTF as it’s simpler, more consistent, and one doesn’t send huge email messages full of utterly useless crap (otherwise known as html tags and stuff). I’ve been using email for 40 years and has been perennially a problem of inconsistent email rendering since html became a format option.

It was however a highly reliable and simple indicator of spam and junk. IF format = HTML then isJunk.

Nowadays with the mindless guzzling at the web junk firehose html email is now ubiquitous and consistent in rendering it seems. But With no improvement in copy or relevance. But it does have bling!

[hnlmorg]

> I set my email clients to use RTF as it’s simpler, more consistent, and one doesn’t send huge email messages full of utterly useless crap (otherwise known as html tags and stuff)

Having written an RTF WYSIWYG editor back in the late 90s, I very much disagree that RTF is any better than HTML for any reasons you’ve cited.

It’s still an ASCII encoded format with font tags and alike. It just opts for curly braces instead of triangle brackets.

The problem with HTML emails isn’t the HTML specification. It’s that

1. Half of email clients don’t support that specification correctly.

2. People abused HTML in emails

However those two points could be just as equally relevant had RTF became the dominant document mark up for the web.

[eviks]

By the way, is there a great modern RTF alternative?

[solarkraft]

HTML

[eviks]

it's neither modern nor great

[lionkor]

I send most of my emails as plaintext - have yet to find a problem with it.

[unsupp0rted]

People need very large red "click here" call-to-action buttons to click inside emails. With plain text email you can't have those. Also people need a sampling of your latest blog posts in a table inside all your emails, with a stock photo in the left column and the article title and snippet in the right column.

[lionkor]

Not sure if sarcasm, but I really never got any value from anything like that.

[donohoe]

It’s must be, because it’s provably incorrect. I say this from actual experience.

[ornornor]

The “problem” is that you can’t embed trackers, images for tracking, and other marketing crap.

[lucumo]

Yes. Famously, this is why stuff on paper ever only uses a single font with empty line paragraph separators, and nothing else.

[imgabe]

Prior to computers most business correspondence would be typewritten in essentially the same font with little or no graphics, maybe a logo on the letterhead if you’re really fancy. That seemed to work fine.

[zamnos]

Ah yes. Prior to computers there was no such thing as art, and then before the invention of color, everything was black and white.

[imgabe]

The topic was email. Email does not need to be art.

[harryvederci]

I thought paper was deprecated?

[zx8080]

Also pens and pencils. Who cares about that since we have chatgpt now!

[eviks]

The problem is pretty obvious - you can't format plain text