Can I Email?

https://www.caniemail.com/

by ggregoire • 5 years ago

682 265 5 years ago

caniemail.com

sebmellen2• 5 years ago

I would pay an extra $0.10 per month to any service which offered plaintext only emails... Ah, a man can dream.

chrismorgan2• 5 years ago

In Fastmail’s webmail:

Settings → Preferences → Show advanced preferences → Reading → View HTML, select Always display messages in plain text.

Settings → Preferences → Show advanced preferences → Compose & Reply → Compose format, select Plain text, plus untick When replying, use the same format as the original message.

I don’t think this is such a rare feature, though it’s generally not made obvious at least.

l0b02• 5 years ago

That's about three levels deeper than most users are comfortable navigating, and as such only a negligible fraction of users will ever see this setting, understand what it does, and change it. Too bad every enterprise solution defaults to HTML anyway.

sebmellen2• 5 years ago

Sorry, I suppose I wasn’t very clear. I do this through Posteo and Tutanota already (though perhaps you could sell me on Fastmail with your insider knowledge ;).

What I mean is I wish companies would send their transactional emails and newsletters in plaintext. Images and the like could be sent as attachments, as opposed to creepy weblinks that track your opens and IP and everything.

I would pay each company $0.10 if they offered me the option of receiving all their emails in plaintext like this.

intc• 5 years ago

We are soon opening https://c1.fi - Horde webmail (https://wm.c1.fi) can do this.

(Preferences -> Mail -> Composition -> Default method to compose messages: "Plain Text")

andrewmcwatters7• 5 years ago

As a side note, I'm amazed that it's 2021 and there's no good mainstream email framework. Foundation ain't it, and MJML is a straight up non-option.

hokumguru• 5 years ago

What’s wrong with MJML?

andrewmcwatters7• 5 years ago

I don’t want a framework to lie to me about what it is that I’m writing.

I’m not interested in learning MJML. I’m interested in learning what subset of HTML and CSS email clients render and rasterize to.

That’s it.

I’m sick of stupid developers shilling their software product that I’m suppose to build other products with.

They do it with these cutesy photoshop/illustrator logos and dribbble crafted color schemes and drop in things like made with love in (city) in their README.mds on GitHub.

I want tools, not someone’s amateur marketing campaign.

andrei_says_• 5 years ago

Not a framework but I’ve found Ted Goas’ Cerberus templates very useful.

I customized them, extracted them into modules and created a design system which I then translated to an email CMS.

Coverage is pretty good although Outlook still glitches in some circumstances.

https://tedgoas.github.io/Cerberus/

FWIW caniemail is unreliable and does not have full coverage.

Also with this level of complexity I’d rather start with a few tested patterns than navigate the insane labyrinth of email client inconsistencies.

andrewmcwatters7• 5 years ago

Yep, I think we need more tools like this around.

chiefalchemist2• 5 years ago

Mind you, I haven't used this in too long, but when I did I don't recall any issues.

https://get.foundation/emails/zurb-stack.html

justinator• 5 years ago

There's a big problem with Foundation for Emails right now - the Saas workflow requires Node v10, which is now unsupported. You can't easily start a new project. It's unclear if this will ever get fixed.

mattwad• 5 years ago

Why is MJML a non-option? It was a huge time saver for me. Combine it with react-mjml and you can get typesafe email templates that work in pretty much any browser. I managed templates by hand for a long time, and it took me a couple weeks to replace everything with MJML, but it was worth it.

Eupolemos2• 5 years ago

I'm remaking my workplace's transactional emails these days (order confirmation, receipt etc. for an online shop - emails customers also reply to when stuff doesn't go as expected). We want something responsive for smartphones, but are primarily a B2B company.

I made what they wanted with MJML. Looked good in a browser, gmail and phone.

Outlook had a few issues, can't remember which right now.

But replying from Outlook simply broke the styling completely. Gaps between each section, complete mess. Not the impression you want to give the customers when their order goes wrong. B2B means Outlook is what out customers use.

I've found that replying via Outlook is the ultimate integrity test of an eamil.

Now I'm making them by hand and it is a madening cargo cult bonanza. Takes a lot of time.

I guess MJML is fine for marketing.

tailspin2019• 5 years ago

I agree, I’ve had pretty good results using MJML now for several years (and I’ve been doing HTML emails since almost the 90’s!)

This is a problem area where a good abstraction framework is highly useful in my opinion.

That said I don’t specialise in email, it’s something I do “when I need to”. So if I was spending more time doing this sort thing, I might be more inclined to move down an abstraction level back to HTML/CSS and improve my knowledge of various client support.

To just get the job done though, MJML is highly recommended.

I see also a lot of mentions on this thread about replying to emails breaking the layout. Part of me thinks we’re fighting a losing battle here anyway so there is a limit to how much time it’s worth spending to make sure even replies are formatted nicely across all clients. But the other thing to consider is whether the email template is just trying to do too much.

I try and keep my email templates very sparse, clean and simple and I generally haven’t had too many issues with reply/forward formatting (that I’m aware of).

saos• 5 years ago

I'd argue against frameworks and for providers to simply update the HTML and CSS they support. Its still bloody tables.

drw852• 5 years ago

I think HTML emails are unnecessary. It's only useful for advertising, marketing and tracking. If you want to show fancy css and design, link a website. If email was used as what it was designed for, writing electronic letters to each other and not spam and ads and marketing, we wouldn't have any of these problems.

urban_alien• 5 years ago

You should take a look at https://heml.io/

dsr_• 5 years ago

Can you not send lorem ipsum as the text/plain part of your MIME message? Please?

I suppose "Your mail program is broken and can't read our message. Please go to this URL" is worse, though.

_jal• 5 years ago

I actually appreciate them. Both are high-quality signals for "this is something I don't care about", so they're great for filters.

l0b02• 5 years ago

It's tempting to make shouldiemail.com and just answer "No" for all these features. Seriously though, it must be years between every time I see an HTML email which would not have been improved by being plain text.

Mandatum• 5 years ago

Anything that's more visual than function, like fashion or trendy design - text is a waste of time.

Email serves every type of business, yes more could be just text - but some will never be served by that format.

swiley• 5 years ago

Anything more visual than function shouldn't be clogging up my inbox.

SilverRed2• 5 years ago

What the average HN user and the average user want is worlds apart. The average person likes their emails to be nicely designed like a website with blocks of colour and the site logos.

When they see a plain text email from a site they would be more likely to think they are being scammed than to be impressed at its simplicity and ability to display in the terminal.

When every website is hacking around broken table layouts to get them to render in outlook (essentially Word), something is wrong and should be fixed.

badsectoracula• 5 years ago

How do you know that is what the average person likes or what they think? Are there any studies for these?

OptionX• 5 years ago

Thats what the average web dev thinks the average person wants.

Jiocus• 5 years ago

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. - Hume, D

§ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauty/#ObjSub

na85• 5 years ago

The average person likes their emails to be nicely designed like a website with blocks of colour and the site logos.

I really don't think that that's true.

door1012• 5 years ago

What the average HN user and the average user want is worlds apart. The average person likes their emails to be nicely designed like a website with blocks of colour and the site logos.

Taste is generated. Cool trendy startups make "nicely designed" emails, users come to expect that. If scam emails looked "nicely designed" and Google sent emails in plaintext, the "nicely designed" emails would be considered untrustworthy. As a counterpoint, an "average user" wants software to work, and forcing every email client to parse HTML (which is far outside the scope of what an email client should do, especially with html as complex as it is today) often breaks things in unexpected ways.

In my opinion, html and plaintext are both inappropriate for email. HTML is far too complex, and plaintext is a bit too simple. I think a markdown-like syntax would be the best balance, but I'm pretty sure that ship has sailed.

userbinator• 5 years ago

One oddity I've noticed is that Germans seem to like their emails in plain text, and without any attachments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15226022

I've corresponded with others, also German, and they had the same preferences, even if not as explicitly stated as the examples in my other comment there.

roydivision• 5 years ago

I posit that the average user doesn't want to put the time into reading plain text to find out if the email is worth their attention, images and colours are easier and quicker to process. A lot of information can be communicated quickly with some photos and a nicely formatted graphically rich message, probably with a large link button that takes the user to a relevant web page for further engagement.

This is not an endorsement of the practice, just an observation.

smsm422• 5 years ago

But do they really? Most those "nicely designed" emails, to be honest, are spam. Either outright spam, like v14g4 and p3n1s pills (modern mail systems deal with those well enough), or only slightly more respectable spam like "you bought in our store once, so now we will hound you forever with ads for our good and services that you don't need anymore".

Among this sea of garbage, there are rare islands of useful updates - like genuine newsletters I subscribed to, or email from my doctor about test results, or reminder from my bank that they are going to deduct that car payment, whether I like it or not, so there better be money there, etc. And of course Amazon shipping notifications! If all those need any HTML, then only the most rudimentary one.

Of course, if you asked a user whether they'd want to get ugly marketing spam or beautiful one, I guess they'd choose the beautiful one. But that's not the right thing to ask.

kevsim• 5 years ago

Fully agree. When we launched our service, we used really simple plain text mails and we had users complaining that they looking unprofessional and spammy. We didn't go crazy with our email design, and we're certainly not pushing the limits of what's possible to use in an email, but just adding a bit of color, a log and some text formatting made a big difference. Haven't heard a complaint since.

varjag3• 5 years ago

From what I've seen from average user, they tend to struggle pasting text with the same font into their email reply, struggle to quote parts of the message or email hyperlinks in usable manner.

TeMPOraL2• 5 years ago

What the average HN user and the average user want is worlds apart. The average person likes their emails to be nicely designed like a website with blocks of colour and the site logos.

Do they? Do they really like it? Did anyone actually asked? And no, A/B testing your design's capability to trick the user into paying you money isn't measuring whether they like it or not.

I have an alternative proposal: average user just accepts what they're given, because they have no other choice. Nobody listens to their opinion (again, tracking and telemetry is not the same as listening to people). Abusive designs and patterns are adopted industry-wide very quickly, so there's rarely an opportunity for the user to vote with their wallet - after all, they can't choose something that's not available in the first place. On top of that, the average user lacks the mental models and language to conceptualize what is wrong and how much better technology could be if it was slightly less abusive. All they can do is accept that computers are annoying, and casually complain about this to friends and family.

GuB-42• 5 years ago

I looked at the mail I really wanted to read from the most reputable entities (banks, government, business partners,...). Usually there is a logo at the top and the rest is mostly plain text with minimal formatting. A nice, colorful email, sometimes from the same companies usually mean one thing: ad.

This is no different from snail mail, where important communication is usually on standard white paper while ads are high quality prints on nice goossy paper.

And obviously, "average users" notice the pattern. Just like my father who almost trashed an important tax-related mail just because it looked too nice, he thought it was an ad.

So the "average user" prefer to see nice ads, I can get that. But what the average user really prefers no ads at all.

gumby• 5 years ago

What’s lame is when there is no plaintext alternative. A clear sign of someone who does not wish to communicate with me.

upofadown• 5 years ago

It at least implies a certain lack of technical expertise on the part of organizations that send such HTML only emails. The same for when they put completely unformated garbage in the text part. If W3M can do a better job starting with their HTML email you have to ask yourself why they couldn't of done at least that instead of whatever they did.

tomjen33• 5 years ago

If it was sent personally to you by somebody who knew your preference you might be right, but realistically the number of people who cares or who have any issue with HTML mails is going to be sub 0.1%, so it is almost certainly more a case of don't care, not worth considering.

codetrotter• 5 years ago

What’s lame is when there is no plaintext alternative.

Or worse yet, when the plaintext alternative version is broken/incomplete.

I regularly receive mail where the plaintext alternative version has templating variable names instead of actual values, where the html version has the values.

Also, systems that send mail where the plaintext alternative version is only something along the lines of “Your email client does not support HTML. Please read this newsletter at” and then a link. But of course, my client can read html too, I just have it set to view the plaintext version by default.

One of these days I will probably just set it to always prefer the html version instead. I use mutt, with elinks taking care of html to plain text conversion. I’ve been running my mail server for years.

But anyways it might soon be time for me to switch to hosted mail. I have a provider in mind.

citrin_ru2• 5 years ago

Sometimes plain text alternative is so bad that one forced to use HTML version anyway. I've tried plain text emails in Atlassian Jira settings - emails it sends are badly formatted and have lots of empty lines, likely they make plaintext version from HTML one with something like `lynx --dump`.

ChrisArchitect2• 5 years ago

Love plaintext but meanwhile, even in tech, people are sending more newsletters than ever

chiefalchemist2• 5 years ago

Not sure about every HTML being plain text but I do wish I had $20 for every overly image heavy email that has no meaning what so ever unless I do "show images." Don't brands understand a fair number of ppl have their email client *not* display images by default?

tomjen33• 5 years ago

Unless you are using Mutt or similar I don't think anybody does not show images by default. I know thunderbird has no problem showing me images that are included in the email.

Remote images are a crime, break the ability to search ofline or keep a record of ones conversation but they have one key advantage for brands which is to spy on you.

donio• 5 years ago

The GNKSA was the real deal. It was for Usenet but a lot of it applies to email too.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160417105503/http://www.gnksa....

FredPret2• 5 years ago

Almost every day, I find myself sending and receiving screenshots placed in context with some text and bullet points. Dare I say it: I love HTML emails

Dylan168074• 5 years ago

You're against bold, italics, underline? Headings? Any image support at all?

beermonster• 5 years ago

You mean bold, /italics/, and _underline_ ? Sure :)

dredmorbius5• 5 years ago

Camel's nose, meet tent.

zzo38computer• 5 years ago

I also prefer plain text email. HTML email is no good, I think. However, you can use a multipart message with a plain part if wanted; Heirloom-mailx and other plain text email clients will then display the plain text part in that case.

You could specify "Content-type: text/markdown" if you want Markdown (although I don't know which email clients will understand that), although I think that plain text is OK.

I also dislike email newsletters or email discussion lists; either way, I would prefer NNTP.

slaymaker19072• 5 years ago

I disagree; while fancy stylings can be excessive, being able to use things like screenshots, headings, and tables is very useful. Sure you can do images and tables through attachments, but that adds extra steps which are inconvenient.

tkzed49• 5 years ago

Recently, I sent a longer-form announcement email and I think it really benefited from simple formatting. Headers that were visually distinct made it easier to parse, and in one place I set an image to float right which I felt made it less disruptive. I even set a max-width on the whole email, which I think works far better than the hard-wrapped text that some people write.

cookiengineer• 5 years ago

Honestly I'm using Thunderbird only because of two things:

- Plain Text Mode

and

- uBlock Origin Extension is available (that can block also embedded JS)

People underestimate the attack vector of emails. I'm glad those scammers haven't figured out (at least until now) how XSS could work in Gecko with XUL. Heap spraying could easily be a thing, given that MS Outlook also still uses their outdated rendering engine.

mrweasel• 5 years ago

For most regular emails and newsletters I would agree. Those who truly care to know which HTML and css tags are available in email client are sending some for of ad.

Say you’re a webshop and a customer has signed up for you “newsletter” then you kinda need HTML emails to show your advertised product directly in an email client.

nxpnsv• 5 years ago

HTML e-mail fill an important function. If it's html, it's a promotion and it gets trashed...

sevrinsky2• 5 years ago

I typically compose all messages in Markdown and then convert that into rendered HTML. So if you believe in the expressiveness of Markdown (which I hope you do), then HTML rendering is absolutely necessary.

Unfortunately, desktop Outlook is miserable with HTML support [1]. In particular, code blocks and quotes become an unreadable mess. The only way that I've found to include readable code blocks is to copy from VS Code, which somehow has the magic HTML combination that Outlook understands.

[1] https://www.caniemail.com/clients/outlook/#windows

jonathanstrange5• 5 years ago

Why is it necessary? The whole point of markdown is that you may render it but it's also fine and easy to read when it remains plaintext.

mro_name3• 5 years ago

Html emails are as selfish and disrespectful like sneezing in other people's faces.

For the sake of presenting marketing (Logos). Disgusting. Wear a mask, write text.

Wilem823• 5 years ago

I mean, how are you going to use rich text otherwise?

saurik• 5 years ago

FWIW, I just don't support HTML email and only for a small handful of services and senders do I ever get burned. If my email client did a pass over the HTML and gave me all the text followed by all the links that would be sufficient (right now I sometimes simulate that by opening up the raw MIME and grabbing what I need). Like, do we live in a world where this even matters? How is your life being made worse by people using these features? E-mail was explicitly designed in a way to support emails that have both HTML and non-HTML, and for people like us--"worst case"--the HTML can be stripped to text and it is fine.

MayeulC• 5 years ago

Wouldn't that end up being a variation of https://useplaintext.email/ ?

paxys• 5 years ago

What standard/RFC does this site pull from? The list of features a client is expected to support seems to be pretty arbitrary.

edoceo• 5 years ago

Its arbitrary cause there is no RFC about the ah-hoc choices email client softwares have made over the years that have kinda become de facto "standards"

Forge36• 5 years ago

https://github.com/hteumeuleu/caniemail

This is specifically focused at HTML specs/features, and a fork of https://github.com/Fyrd/caniuse

Targeting HTML rendering engines which are email clients.

Fortunately (at least for some of the newer features to be included) Links to MDN are available, and caniuse both link to we spec). CSS min for example is working draft. https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-4/#math-function

With 90% desktop/mobile browser general usage support, 50% email usage support.

azernik4• 5 years ago

AFAIU this is a fork of caniuse.com; the features it tracks are probably a strict subset of those.

The feature definitions seem to be maintained manually, at https://github.com/hteumeuleu/caniemail/tree/master/_feature...; assuming it follows the caniuse.com community model, information about supported browsers is similarly crowdsourced.

dang• 5 years ago

One past thread:

Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20948826 - Sept 2019 (196 comments)

ChrisArchitect2• 5 years ago

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20948826

tyingq• 5 years ago

I like the AMP for email table: https://www.caniemail.com/features/amp/

PostHeat• 5 years ago

This seems pretty useful. I'm actually working on a project right now (https://postheat.com) to automate all the styling and html for devs and I've had to learn most of this the hard way...

I think you need some example search b/c I was not sure how to use the tool at first.

mrwnmonm• 5 years ago

If that can be applied on a complete html file, it would be great. Take the html, and tell the user which tags will likely cause problems.

overspeed• 5 years ago

Continuously modifying the URL with the search term wreaks havoc on tab history. Why not wait for the user to finish typing first?

mvlpn• 5 years ago

I have no clue why something this obvious is not taken care of.

larsnystrom• 5 years ago

They should just use history.replaceState() instead of history.pushState().

josteink• 5 years ago

Weird to see Thunderbird for Mac and Windows perform so differently. Anyone knows what’s up with that?

(And what about Linux?)

zekica• 5 years ago

From what I can see, they haven't tested most of the features in Thunderbird for Windows.

From my experience, all versions (Windows, macOS, Linux) have the same features.

ipaddr• 5 years ago

I've been using thunderbird for probably 15 years and have forgotten about html emails. I can imagine they are popular but it is probably the great fishing surface the average user is exposed to.

azernik4• 5 years ago

Oh I wish I'd heard of this 2 years ago, would have saved me a lot of trial and error.

domano• 5 years ago

I find MJML (Mailjet Markup Language) to be a solution for many headaches.

timvisee• 5 years ago

I love companies that send both HTML and plain text!

Liskni_si• 5 years ago

…as long as they contain the same content. I've seen e-mails where the HTML content is up to date, and the plain text part contains whatever was being sent a couple years ago, and hasn't been updated since then. Got me quite confused until I figured it out.

_vvhw3• 5 years ago

Another way of looking at this scoreboard is as an approximate inverse ranking of webmail client security and leak vectors, with Gmail stripping far more dangerous elements than most webmail clients.

This is actually a great tool to find vulnerabilities in various webmail clients such as ProtonMail and Hey, just compare the HTML or CSS features they do not yet filter compared to Gmail, then do a search for "[feature] + exploit" to see how a feature could be abused, and then submit a bounty report.

For example, there are alot of good reasons that you may not want your webmail rendering SVG images (mXSS, appcache poisoning) or allowing CSS variables or imports.

And I'm pretty sure the list supported by Gmail could also be narrowed down further. There are some fantastic bounties lurking in here, just waiting to be discovered.

felixfbecker2• 5 years ago

Curious, what's the risk with SVG, assuming a CSP is used for it that doesn't allow anything (including no scripts)?

_vvhw3• 5 years ago

SVG is a minefield so massive it's hard to give an exhaustive list of everything that could go wrong. Especially when these kinds of assets might be hosted on user content domains and where webmail clients might allow access to the SVG content with inline disposition but outside of an IMG tag (most browsers enable/disable various SVG features such as JS or an app cache manifest according to context). There are also a ton of weird rendering modes that can be triggered for SVG (or MathML) and these can be used to bypass XSS sanitizers by means of mXSS which exploits differences in browser renderings when roundtripping content.

And sites with strong CSPs are often especially vulnerable to scriptless attacks, perhaps because they feel more protected. For example, in 2019, there was a bug bounty disclosure to Fastmail about a way to intercept and proxy all email attachment downloads, completely client-side, and yet without involving any JavaScript, simply using HTML5 AppCache. This also affected a whole lot of other providers, but the Fastmail team patched this within 24 hours, a pretty amazing response, and the quickest by far.

Here's a fantastic paper from Mario Heiderich (of Cure53) from 2012 on various kinds of scriptless attacks: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.46...

jb1991• 5 years ago

I’d love to know where FastMail ranks on here.

_vvhw3• 5 years ago

Fastmail's security is top notch. They're using Cure53's DOMPurify and their team understand these vectors really well, with strict filtering. Their pixel tracking blocking was better than Hey's when last I checked, and I reported three leaks to Hey that were not fixed for some time. Fastmail also run one of the best bounties I have ever participated in. I would even say significantly better than ProtonMail, having participated in both bug bounties.

stephenr2• 5 years ago

Oh yeah.

Those nth-child* selectors Gmail strips out are a real security nightmare.

traspler2• 5 years ago

"Outlook (Windows)" is dead last in the "rankings". That's pretty much the only page on there that matters sadly; Determining which features work on Outlook for Windows and that's the maximum that can go into an HTML EMail.

Sure, I'd love to only send txt mails but that sadly does not align with the expectations/desires of the companies I've worked with.

felixfbecker2• 5 years ago

If Microsoft could just bundle their Edge/Chromium renderer instead of their ancient WordHTML engine, or even the EdgeHTML engine of the previous Edge, they'd do the whole industry a huge favor. It's so frustrating their holding us back. Instead, they allow Google to push technologies like AMP for email for things that could probably be solved with standard HTML.

mschuster91• 5 years ago

Biggest joke is, they're already having a decent renderer on macOS.

You can load plain HTML as a .eml template into it and send it off... but not on Windows, you're stuck with some weird undocumented binary format there.

traspler2• 5 years ago

The situation is wild. In older Outlook versions they've used IE to render the received mails but used a custom engine when you were writing/editing an email. You could even use Word as an editor so you could generate the HTML using Word as your WYSIWYG IDE. I can understand why that needed some consolidation into one editor and one engine but re-using Word so they wouldn't have to create a new editor wasn't the best decision for the ecosystem.

WYSIWYG editors and rendering engines aren't things I know about so I wonder if there have been difficult engineering issues at that time or if they just went at it from a business standpoint of "people see mail like letters so they are documents for which we have word so let's use that".

//Edit: Looks like they were mainly interested in providing a great WYSIWYG experience using tools users are already familiar with: https://web.archive.org/web/20110311083708/http:/blogs.offic... great quote: "There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability. The “Email Standards Project” does not represent a sanctioned standard or an industry consensus in this area. Should such a consensus arise, we will of course work with other e-mail vendors to provide rich support in our products." - I guess their argument could be that there still is no "HTML standard for email" so they don't have to support anything they don't want to?

unilynx• 5 years ago

They could easily do that. But they want to use their Word component to compose replies to emails. So it needs to go through the WordHTML at some point..

And from that perspective, it's better to break the mail as it's coming in (so the sender gets blamed) rather than at the moment the user clicks reply.

m0dest• 5 years ago

I will never believe or respect Microsoft's supposed "open source" renaissance until they do something about reading and writing proper HTML/CSS in Outlook-Windows. The damage from the last 15 years of WordHTML has been irreversible.

qwertox• 5 years ago

My first thought was that the higher on the list a client is, the more vulnerable it is.

Am I wrong with this assumption?

lionkor3• 5 years ago

I would say that, generally, higher complexity results in more possible attack vectors. Give that assumption, any client high on the list has more attack vectors than ones down the list.

I also think, though, that any open source client likely does a good job regardless of feature density, since its likely going to use well vetted code in core components.

Saying that, for example, Microsoft's or Apple's code isnt well vetted is unfair, but the amount of eyes that have seen the Microsoft html renderer vs the, say, WebKit one, is likely smaller and less diverse.

stjohnswarts6• 5 years ago

Yes.

danellis• 5 years ago

This is going to be really useful to me as someone who doesn't really do this kind of thing. Very timely.

But don't put every keypress from my searches into my browser history.

lionkor3• 5 years ago

Get KMail on the list!

stjohnswarts6• 5 years ago

not enough users.

lionkor3• 5 years ago

well yeah, without builtin telemetry and government-grade spying, you can't tell how many users it has, fair

Edit: i realize this comes off as snarky, sorry. It's meant as a joke. It's reasonable to say that its likely not popular enough.

shoto_io• 5 years ago

Neat site!

We use MJML to ensure compatibility in all mail clients, which works fine. Although MJML is much less flexible than pure HTML.

kuon• 5 years ago

I really don't like HTML emails as they very often break with my dark theme. Especially those in Outlook, dark blue on dark gray is not very visible. I'd like to have only plain text emails, but some website do not put text version of their mails (notifications...).

Grustaf3• 5 years ago

I wish people didn’t use html at all for emails…

sleavey• 5 years ago

First thing I do when I install Thunderbird on a new computer: disable HTML, enable monospace font.

wiz21c• 5 years ago

Yeah, receiving email in html format is painful. With text, I can look at them the way I want.

simias• 5 years ago

I still only send plaintext myself, but clearly that ship has sailed. Many mailers don't even bother adding a proper text/plain alternative anymore.

I caved in and replaced mutt with Thunderbird personally. Not only for properly displaying HTML, but it was a big reason. Thunderbird sucks massively for composing plain text emails though, and no simple way to integrate an external editor...

rauhl3• 5 years ago

I caved in and replaced mutt with Thunderbird personally. Not only for properly displaying HTML, but it was a big reason. Thunderbird sucks massively for composing plain text emails though, and no simple way to integrate an external editor...

Have you considered emacs with notmuch and the Gnus renderer? It displays most HTML emails well, and when it doesn’t then a browser is just a quick ‘. b’ away. And of course there’s no need to integrate an external editor, because it’s integrated within the editor!

As a plus, it is simply amazing how quickly one can search local email.

jesusjosephsson• 5 years ago

I wish I could set up automatic replies to mails lacking plain text.

ubermonkey2• 5 years ago

How would you support formatted text in email, then?

Please don't say "there shouldn't be formatted text in email." That's not a reasonable position.

rauhl3• 5 years ago

How would you support formatted text in email, then?

RFC 1896 specifies text/enriched: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1896

And of course nowadays there is Markdown, which basically codifies a lot of earlier plain-text formatting conventions.

Please don't say "there shouldn't be formatted text in email." That's not a reasonable position.

I don’t know about that, really. We got by fine with plain text messages for decades, and the formatting conventions were good enough to convey meaning and nuance.

Grustaf3• 5 years ago

I’m not saying it’s reasonable, I’m just saying I would prefer it. I also would prefer websites without ads and social networks without arbitrary “community rules” but it’s not going to happen.

jeroenhd• 5 years ago

I'm fine with HTML myself, actually; it's stuff like CSS that I'm more worried about.

There are plenty of use cases for <li>/<h1>/<em> in emails, and with some nice default user styles they can give everyone a pleasant experience.

Sadly, CSS is often applied and the HTML people write is often broken.

Grustaf3• 5 years ago

You say that, but then a couple of times a month i get emails from a certain cultural society that for some reason always come out with the main text in one giant, one letter wide column… Both on the phone and outlook webmail!

paultopia• 5 years ago

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."

st_goliath• 5 years ago

On a very similar discussion (e-mail feature bloat; particularly HTML mail) I once heard somebody describe the software developers involved to have suffered from "Beach Boy Syndrome" (wouldn't it be nice if...)

unlimit• 5 years ago

I could not even understand what the site did. :-(

nimbius• 5 years ago

This page ranks email clients based on their support among the 182 HTML and CSS features

No thanks. I still recoil at the sight of a read-receipt and the only reason most companies include any of this dreck in an email in 2021 is to either track me or market to me.

make email text again.

breakfastduck5• 5 years ago

You can track people through CSS?

hanche2• 5 years ago

Specify a background image?

FranchuFranchu2• 5 years ago

Load a background image and store the IPs that asked for it.

tzs• 5 years ago

make email text again

That ship sailed the instant it got named "email" instead of something like "etelegram".

With mail, I can send anything that my printer can print, which is everything my word processor can handle (fonts, text decoration, foreground and background colors, inline images, graphs, tables, and more) and attach anything that fits in the envelope (a CD-ROM of arbitrary data in any format).

It was inevitable that email would end up being able to handle the electronic equivalent of all those things.

The problem with email is not that it now handles more than just plain text. The problem is that there was no early agreement on how to handle those things, so different implementors came up with different ways to do it, which eventually converged on using HTML. Not because HTML was necessarily the best way to do it, but because it was something they all already implemented for other things or was already available on the systems their mail clients ran on.

But modern HTML engines are designed for the web, so there still really needs to be some sort of agreement on a subset of HTML that handles the things necessary to make email like mail, without including things that make sense for the web but not for mail.

systemvoltage• 5 years ago

No one knows if I opened a letter or threw it in a trash can.

Sohcahtoa82• 5 years ago

I don't think naming it "etelegram" would have changed anything. It's just a name.

warrenm2• 5 years ago

But modern HTML engines are designed for the web, so there still really needs to be some sort of agreement on a subset of HTML that handles the things necessary to make email like mail, without including things that make sense for the web but not for mail.

What would you think only makes sense for the web and not for mail?

surround• 5 years ago

If companies want to have inline images in their emails, they should have to send the image data along with the rest of the message. Email clients should not allow emails to load third party resources.

stephenr2• 5 years ago

What, so that the client has literally no choice of not showing the images, even you just want to view the text version?

Good email clients already provide a very simple solution: a user option to disable loading remote content, with a per-message option to load it.

Your suggestion would mean that my mail client has to download a ridiculously larger volume of data than it does now.

greyhair• 5 years ago

There is nothing I hate more than rich content email.

Send me plain text email.

Add attachments that I can scan for issues before I open them.

If you send me links, I will be very wary of visiting them outside a sandboxed tab. I will not 'click through' from the email client.

kleer001• 5 years ago

If you send me links, I will be very wary of visiting them outside a sandboxed tab.

I got a link to re-up a certain type of account from my bank. It was very odd, I was quite confused.

Breza5• 5 years ago

I like to use wheregoes.com to probe links. I'm surprised at how many redirects some of them have. I get that an ad link might go through an ad channel, but clicking one non-spam link from a reputable company can plant cookies from a whole bunch of websites.

sh1mmer• 5 years ago

It would be great if the JSON data could be easily plugged into a linter so you could quickly validate if you are likely to have issues on a given client or not.

fxleach• 5 years ago

At first glance I have no idea what this website does. At second glance I still don't.

FranchuFranchu2• 5 years ago

It checks whether an email client supports and HTML or CSS feature for rendering.

emaillio• 5 years ago

great tool for emailgeeks!

strenholme• 5 years ago

I made the mistake of giving too many companies my email address when those stupid black-the-page popups come up asking for my email. I am in the process of unsubscribing from every one of those emails; there is usually a small “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of them, and they are usually pretty good about honoring unsubscription requests.

These days, I disable Javascript on any site which has the audacity to put a popup in the middle of the page as I am reading it. Any site with is not readable without Javascript is one I leave and don’t go back to.

The kinds of sleazy outfits which do not honor unsubscribes are the kinds of places email providers are really good about black listing.

mnx• 5 years ago

Only 50% support for <marquee>? Where is this world going.

dethos• 5 years ago

I still prefer text-only emails. I block as much external content as possible and usually those marketing and elaborate designs are all broken. It is very rare that I allow exceptions.

That being said, I can see the usefulness of this tool for developers, I just wish people would rely more on plain text.

kilodeca• 5 years ago

https://useplaintext.email/

neop1x• 5 years ago

Email is not a webpage. Keep your web skills for the web, please.

Can I Email?

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