[distcs]

Another outlier here. Glad to see there are other like minded people on this thread.

While viewing emails on the web interface I use the email provider setting to block images from loading. That along with an ad blocker and JS blocker does a good job.

You are right that the text versions of many emails are terribly broken. I don't think the text versions are paid attention to anymore. I have been on the other side sending out mailers to our customers and while working with mailer systems I realized that the de facto way of working these days is to compose an HTML email and let the mailer system strip out all the HTML tags to create the text version. Of course that leads to terrible text versions of the emails.

[tourmalinetaco]

Yet another outlier, and I’ve experienced a similar problem in a different way.

I actually use email-to-RSS with a dedicated reader to further compartmentalize myself, and I’ve found so many needlessly mutilated plain text newsletters. I don’t understand it. Maybe some notion that HTML/CSS/JS in emails increases turnover? In some cases I get it, for instance my local grocer probably benefits heavily from all the pretty pictures and hyperlinks. However my local news org sends out almost entirely HTML-formatted “plain” text, so that just seems like useless effort. And if its because the automated mail systems use it as defaults, that makes a lot of sense.

[anthk]

Mutt for instance can use Lynx to render HTML content in the background, you just read the rendered result as text.