Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

https://www.caniemail.com/

by fagnerbrack • 2 years ago

755 234 2 years ago

caniemail.com

whoisthemachine• 2 years ago

The two most popular clients, Gmail and Outlook, are ranked at 25 and 41 (the bottom) respectively.

jolmg3• 2 years ago

That's reminiscent of IE, being the most popular and underfeatured.

dylan6046• 2 years ago

Most popular only because it was included with the OS and most IT departments did not allow use of other browsers. Just because it was the most installed does not make it the most popular. There was an old saying, "Internet Explorer: the most used browser to download another browser."

tgv• 2 years ago

When I look at the features gmail doesn't support, I see things like "display: none", animation, and other kinds of css which arguably shouldn't be part of an email. The basics are there, so that makes high ranking not necessarily a good target.

decremental• 2 years ago

I wish there was something like BrowserStack but you send a test email and it shows you how it renders on tons of different email clients on various platforms. It wouldn't work for web-based email like Gmail but it would still be useful.

benmanns• 2 years ago

Good news, https://www.litmus.com/ is exactly this, and does work for Gmail.

solardev• 2 years ago

And Mailchimp has a built-in integration: https://mailchimp.com/help/test-with-inbox-preview/

rsoto• 2 years ago

Best tool I've found is Testi@[1]. It's really affordable and it supports basically everything out there.

* Disclaimer: Not affiliated, just a happy customer.

- [1] https://testi.at/

shortformblog12• 2 years ago

This looks cool, thank you for sharing!

iamacyborg4• 2 years ago

There are quite a few tools that literally do exactly what you’re asking for.

rrrx3• 2 years ago

Litmus, testi@, Email on Acid, InboxMonster, SendForensics, Email Preview Services…

Most if not all also support stuff like deliverability, DMARC testing, Analytics, Accessibility, as well as web-based render testing. I think rendering engine wise, Testi@ has the largest device/platform coverage. Or at least last I checked.

Julesman• 2 years ago

I think it would be more useful to list the few CSS properties that all email clients do recognize. I don't mean to be flippant. I'm serious.

CanIEmail? The answer is generally no.

SigmundurM• 2 years ago

If you go to this page: https://www.caniemail.com/clients/

and select "check all", it'll show you the features that are supported by all the email clients, and separately, which features have mixed support.

These appear to be the few features supported by all clients:

- border-collapse

- font shorthand

- list-style-type

- cm unit

- em unit

- ex unit

- in unit

- mm unit

- pc unit

- % unit

- pt unit

- px unit

- vertical-align

- <del> element

- <div> element

- <h1> to <h6> elements

- <hr> element

- <img> element

- <p> element

- <pre> element

- <span> element

- <strong> element

- <table> element

- valign attribute

- JPG image format

- PNG image format

kylehotchkiss• 2 years ago

Outlook supporting padding in 2003 then not really supporting it in any follow up client sounds just about right for the dumpster fire experience that is trying to make an email look nice.

userbinator2• 2 years ago

The lower the score, the better. I know many who have a policy of "emails must be in plaintext only, with no attachments unless agreed to in advance; everything else gets deleted automatically."

shortformblog12• 2 years ago

Expand your group of people, because you clearly don’t know enough people.

dylan6046• 2 years ago

I disagree. I wish I had more people that fit that filter. Email is broken and just a platform for spam. Even if it might be from someone that I purchased something from once or even regularly, if I did not select a check box to opt-in to receiving your email, it is spam.

It's 2024. Emailing large file attachments is about as old and busted as FTP. There are so many other services to "share" large files. Attachment to email was such a kludgy hack in the first place just shows it was only the best worst idea waiting for better solutions. We have them now.

evantbyrne• 2 years ago

They said many of the people they know only accept plaintext, not all of them. We should interpret each other generously.

yyyk• 2 years ago

There's a good case for expanding slightly on plaintext. It's not just decorative - some usecases like Right-to-Left or lists or linked are helped by a little markup, and HTML is good enough.

The problem is going overboard on CSS (maybe none should be allowed) or allowing any javascript at all. I can't recall any email security issue ever which is HTML only without any CSS or javascript.

jimbobthrowawy• 2 years ago

I know at least two people who send emails where the HTML version is either blank or tells the recipient to stop using a bloated client, and the actual email content is in the plaintext fallback. I think I had to look at the email source in thunderbird to read them.

FigurativeVoid• 2 years ago

I was using this for a feature I was working on last week.

That’s when I learned gmail doesn’t support SVG???? That seems like a huge miss.

peddling-brink• 2 years ago

SVG supports JavaScript.

arjvik2• 2 years ago

can't Gmail support SVG without javascript?

cypherpunks012• 2 years ago

Huh, I didn't really fully understand that about SVG. Thanks for the info.

From what I'm reading, it seems that from inside an SVG script, you can call out to javascript functions of the parent page? That seems kinda surprising, I'm sure there are security policies around it, but it means that there are potential security and performance risks/considerations around hosting and serving SVG files that I didn't realize existed.

candiddevmike2• 2 years ago

IMO, HTML was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content is the best content.

astrodust4• 2 years ago

It's easy to say this, but can you imagine the hodge-podge of proprietary garbage we'd have to deal with if you couldn't email a simple file attachment to someone?

arjvik2• 2 years ago

Can still do plain text with attachments... unless you expect that companies would move to emailing you HTML files of their message?

candiddevmike2• 2 years ago

I think that hodge podge (OneDrive, Google drive, Dropbox, etc) is what most people already use. "Simple file attachments" are an oxymoron these days--size/extension restrictions, spam scores, not to mention the hell of iterating over email.

smsm42• 2 years ago

I'm good with attachment when you need to send me a real document, but if the email text itself ends up being multi-megabyte blob because you absolutely must have your name in the signature in blue and italic, then I tend to frown upon this. Over decades of my work I probably sent thousands of emails, yet very rarely if ever I needed HTML capabilities, and pretty much never ones that go beyond very basic Markup formatting.

hollerith4• 2 years ago

I'm confused. How is HTML needed to attach a file (or to open the attachment)?

feikname• 2 years ago

Email attachments are defined through MIME and don't depend at all on HTML being available as a Content-Type. We could well have had another format and attachments together.

StableAlkyne• 2 years ago

That's a completely valid opinion, and I prefer plaintext as well

But at this point, it's pretty clear that most non-technical people prefer emails with fancy text and graphics.

Personally, I'm just glad that email is a flexible enough medium to allow that. It's better than the alternative, where people moved to some closed, proprietary protocol behind like 20 patents that allows the same thing.

Is there any other common way we communicate over screens (aside from http) that has had the staying power of email for the general public? I think that's a testament to the sheer flexibility of it. The ugliness that people have contorted email into is a badge of honor IMO

throw0101c3• 2 years ago

But at this point, it's pretty clear that most non-technical people prefer emails with fancy text and graphics.

And what percentage of e-mails from people / human beings have those things?

Certainly marketing e-mails have fancy formats, but I've rarely seen any person at a companies I've worked at use any kind of formatting: generally most folks hit reply and start typing with whatever the default is. Hardly any italics or bold, and forget about fixed width (for things like CLI commands in technical discussions).

Heck, even Slack messages these styles are hardly used (on my current team I use them the most since I know that Markdown so it's easy for me to throw in some **, //, or `` in my typing flow, so I can highlight hostnames, CLI commands, etc).

dzhiurgis3• 2 years ago

My guess SMS (and similar) (by volume) are more frequent than email.

Anecdotally, I only get 2-3 actual human emails per _year_. Rest is transactional spam.

jordanreger• 2 years ago

Pretty much the only credit I'll give to Amazon is that they give the option to get plaintext emails. Doesn't mask the larger problems, but still a nice thing I wish was the norm.

HelmetFigNewton4• 2 years ago

Amazon deserves zero credit for anything regarding E-mail, because their "order confirmations" don't say WHAT YOU ORDERED.

Mind-bogglingly stupid and annoying.

legitster• 2 years ago

Plain text content is the best content.

Hard disagree. Things like bolding text, adding pictures, changing colors, etc are very important for the emails I send. So some amount of HTML is important to me.

arp2425• 2 years ago

Lack of ability to distinguish between pre-formatted text and regular prose alone makes it a complete non-starter for most who aren't reading monospaced text in a terminal. I don't really like reading monospace text for prose (many people don't), and using proportional fonts means things that are supposed to be aligned will break (and if you restrict yourself to text only, you'll find yourself aligning things on occasion for tables or other content).

I actually use plain text in FastMail because it's "better" than HTML (usually), but it's not good.

Ability to send text/markdown natively would be pretty brilliant.

HelmetFigNewton4• 2 years ago

RTF would be fine, then.

ktosobcy5• 2 years ago

plain-text with some sort of simple formatting would be fine (markdown/asciidoc). We don't have to go overboard in the opposite direction...

prmoustache6• 2 years ago

Gemtext[1] would have been perfect and way enough while still being legible on a terminal. Italic and bold can be done via unicode, you don't need a markup language for that.

[1] https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/gemtext.gmi

cortesoft• 2 years ago

I like being able to email in line photos

Dylan16807• 2 years ago

Weird limited HTML isn't fun, but images, basic layout, and some amount of font control are all pretty important features.

nox101• 2 years ago

This reads me as "I prefer letters" or "I prefer fax"

HTML is what non-techies want, or rather, they want to insert pictures and videos directly inline. They want to bold and highlight. They want bullet lists and numbered lists. They want to change fonts, make headlines, etc.. And they want it all to reflow for their device.

I do to. I don't want to say in the 70s terminal. I get that lots of techies wish the world was still 80 column monochrome ASCII only but you're the exception.

medstrom• 2 years ago

"80 column monochrome ASCII only"

Mmm... Paradise

nebulous1• 2 years ago

I think the "techies" that you are referring to just see the issues with html email that the non-techies don't notice. Some of course just want things to be more like the 80-column monochrome that you mention, but for most it's not that extreme.

I think HTML is way too complicated for email, and it would have been much better if they'd standardised on a version of markdown.

That ship has sailed though, so we're stuck between using HTML or plain text.

lelanthran7• 2 years ago

IMO, HTML was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content is the best content.

Your first statement might be true (it's debatable). Your second is definitely false.

Lets assume that HTML really was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content for email is still not the best content.

People want to:

1. Click on a link in the email, not fumble with copy and paste on their phone.

2. See decently formatted paragraphs and content with bold, italics and different font sizes for headings and paragraphs, not a wall of text.

3. See images in the email itself, not have to once again fumble around with copy and paste.

4. Correctly formatted bullet points, including sub-lists.

For all of the above, some sort of format is required. If we exclude HTML as a possibility, you're still going to have to need a format of some type, because the wall-o-text format is not a good UI.

makapuf• 2 years ago

A subset of markdown (since you can use html in markdown) might be a good candidate.

ivanjermakov2• 2 years ago

Regarding 1. it's up to the client to parse and highlight links in plain text.

ktosobcy5• 2 years ago

1. all links are click-able at this point; what's more plain-text would force to provide just a link without all the tracking garbage 2. you can have paragraphs and headings... it's just a matter of structure - using html you can write a wall of text just fine 3. not sure if needed, besides you can attach images to plain text (though not inlining) or click-able links to external sources (at exact place) 4. still - easily do-able; it's a matter of particular editor tracking lists - for markdown editors it works just fine and in the end you virtually have a "plain text bullet list"... magic.

The most contagious/problematic issue is (3) and inlining - as I said, it's possible to attach anything but the location is lost. Probably something simple like anchor (again, markdown linking comes to mind) to indicate placement would be just fine...

(I loath html mails with passion…)

mavhc• 2 years ago

Surely lack of soft wrapping in the first version was the worst thing to happen to email, that breaks quoting, which leads to top posting.

Also lack of a signature section, relying on weird -- \n hacks

nedt4• 2 years ago

Worst thing is spam. Second worst is silos by big players to fight spam, which makes it hard to run your own email server. Then comes HTML.

iamacyborg4• 2 years ago

Making it hard to run your own server seems to be a small price to pay to ensure billions of inboxes don’t get overly spammed.

kivlad• 2 years ago

The new Outlook desktop client is awful, but there's one silver lining and it's the retirement of the even more awful Word HTML renderer.

croes3• 2 years ago

MS did it on purpose for security reasons

chrismorgan• 2 years ago

Are you sure? I have a vague recollection of someone confirming late last year that it was still MSO. But I may be mistaken.

ceejayoz• 2 years ago

I thought this'd be one of those novelty sites that just say "No." in a big font.

beAbU• 2 years ago

That's usually my default answer when my design team comes to me with a request for email template updates. "No. Basic formatting only. If you are feeling frisky, tables. Nothing more"

NoGravitas• 2 years ago

Really should have been.

blcknight• 2 years ago

Hehe, apple mail supports marquee very recently... Outlook even more so! 2020!

https://www.caniemail.com/search/?s=marquee

zipping1549• 2 years ago

Bost mased HTML tag

eqvinox• 2 years ago

Isn't AMP considered an antifeature these days? Last I heard even Google had abandoned it — but this is outside my zone of expertise, so I might be wrong?

dubcanada• 2 years ago

It’s still quite wildly on websites. But it doesn’t even have support for GA4 yet. It’s probably dead just not yet on the dead list.

dylan6046• 2 years ago

You maybe underestimating the number of people that use things without knowing what said things do, so those things just continue to live and never get migrated away from use.

shortformblog12• 2 years ago

AMP for email is a bit different of a beast. It works a lot differently from the web version and is used essentially to add interactivity to the email. If you use Google Docs, it’s what allows you to directly reply to a comment in your inbox.

chrisfrantz• 2 years ago

I use this daily, great resource.

astrodust4• 2 years ago

Alas! https://www.caniemail.com/search/?s=strongbad

dang• 2 years ago

Can I Email? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27112960 - May 2021 (273 comments)

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

'Can I Use' for Email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20934601 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)

Eric_WVGG2• 2 years ago

HTML email was such a tragic mistake.

I think the whole mess could have been averted if Markdown had been invented about twenty years earlier.

zzzkkk• 2 years ago

Is this intended as sarcasm? Markdown renders to html, it's an authoring syntax that happens to be readable in it's "code" state. How would it solve email?

The real issue is bespoke rendering engines instead of just using a rule of "everything the current browser can do, but no js".

shortformblog12• 2 years ago

Yes, this. Many more would be fine with HTML email if it didn’t work like IE6—and honestly, the only reason it does is because of decades-old enshittification that we failed to address at the time.

pavo-etc• 2 years ago

If emails could be marked up with the subset of HTML that Markdown is able to generate without having inlined HTML tags, email markup would be so pleasant. Just bold/italics, some headings, tables, properly flowing text, code blocks, horizontal rule, links, and images.

Eric_WVGG2• 2 years ago

Not in the slightest.

You can’t make elaborate layouts with Markdown. You can’t obfuscate text in images or make hidden links or inject JavaScript.

Just some basic text styling (headers, italics, bold type), and images. Everything necessary to make a well-formatted message — which is what email is supposed to be — instead of mailing a web page, in a medium that hasn’t been refined for quality and safety like modern HTML+CSS has.

arp2425• 2 years ago

Markdown gives most people >95% of the formatting they want to do.

It's easy and fairly intuitive to write (most of it, anyway).

It's easy to read in different formats and ways (HTML, plain text).

It doesn't add highly complex rendering issues. I've worked on two email clients in the last ten years, and the amount of weird HTML some send is just bonkers. Is <div style="position:fixed"> in emails crazy? Yes. Do you need to deal with it? Also yes.

teddyh• 2 years ago

We did have text/enriched¹ since 1994, but everybody mostly ignored it.

1. <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1896>

HelmetFigNewton4• 2 years ago

RTF was invented in 1987.

langsoul-com• 2 years ago

Non proper and standard HTML email was and still is a mistake.

You're really rolling a dice on what may work, even if it's valid HTML

l0b0• 2 years ago

Is there something like this for features techies might care about? Like some sort of guarantee of at-rest encryption, SMTP/IMAP/POP/etc support, end user encryption, reasonably fast search, backup/restore, etc.

GNOME Evolution and Thunderbird, at least last I used it, have abysmal search speed, taking seconds to search through a local DB of a few thousand emails. So they're clearly using search tech much inferior to a local DB with indexes.

fastball• 2 years ago

I don't know about most of your list, but I do know that Proton Mail has E2EE email encryption via their proprietary client.

andrew_• 2 years ago

FWIW jsx-email has a builtin CLI email client compatibility check which uses the caniemail dataset: https://jsx.email/docs/core/cli#check

ryanbigg• 2 years ago

What an excellent resource! (And yes Outlook is a pain and supports so very little!)

We've tried building email templates for notifications for our apps where I work, and it has typically been a pain. We have since swapped to using mjml (https://mjml.io/) to build the templates, and it's working wonders. The output seems the be the most compatible with all different devices that we've tested on.

The other tool we enjoy using is Litmus (https://litmus.com), which allows you to throw in an email template and see what it looks like on all kinds of apps and devices. Other thread here mentions https://testi.at/ as well, which we've also had success with.

All of these have been really invaluable to designing emails for our apps.

shortformblog12• 2 years ago

MJML is easily the best tool of its kind and I use it a lot. If anyone is trying to build emails in 2024, it's a major shortcut that helps avoid and mitigate some of HTML email’s biggest headaches.

iamacyborg4• 2 years ago

It can quite quickly lead to clipping in gmail if you’re not careful though.

dabber• 2 years ago

mjml looks really interesting, thanks for sharing. I wish there was a business reason for orgs to care about accessable and machine readable (I guess OCR is a thing now but still) emails.

I've been using Foundation for Emails[1] for the very small number of emails that I've worked on which required more than just a list of img tags, and I really appreciate it for existing because HTML emails have been stuck in ie6 web days.

[1] https://get.foundation/emails.html

darekkay• 2 years ago

I wish there was a business reason for orgs to care about accessable and machine readable emails.

I hope the upcoming EU Accessibility Act will be enough for many organizations to finally make their emails accessible. I disable images by default in my email client, and some emails are pretty much empty without them, without providing any alternative.

varnaud• 2 years ago

I assume most email client support email with both html and txt content. If they don't support html or configured not to display it, the txt version is displayed.

We have a html and txt template for each email we send. It's not exactly double the work, but it's appreciated by some of our customers.

amluto• 2 years ago

I wish there was a business reason for orgs to care about accessable and machine readable

Isn’t the whole point of sending emails to get the recipient to read them? If the recipient can’t read them, you wasted that money and captured no value. Possibly negative value because you just reminded the recipient of how annoying your website is. “Oh right, that vendor with the full-page modal that I couldn’t dismiss, or was it the vendor that had a pretty site that turned gray three seconds after loading for not discernible reason and wouldn’t let me click anything after that? I’ll just shop at Amazon next time even though they’re more expensive and vaguely evil.”

almost• 2 years ago

Thank you so much for linking testi.at. I’ve been looking for an affordable alternative to Litmus!

rjzzleep• 2 years ago

What an excellent resource! (And yes Outlook is a pain and supports so very little!)

So outlook today is the internet explorer of mail?

easton• 2 years ago

It literally is, Outlook for Windows uses the IE9 engine to render HTML email, IIRC. And even then not everything is supported.

another_kel• 2 years ago

Kind of. Though if outlook magically goes away we'll still make emails with <table> because most clients still do not support even flex-direction. Outlook is just exceptionally bad with stuff like width:100px working on table elements, but not on <div>, or padding working only on specific elements.

chrisldgk• 2 years ago

While we‘re here I‘d also like to recommend react-email[1] which I‘ve been using for building emails for a while now. The components it offers are more than enough and it‘s definitely better than building mails with <!—MSO—> tags every five lines like we did back in my email marketing days.

[1] https://react.email

cchance• 2 years ago

Holy shit all of those are awesome links, I'm working on an internal tool and i like to have clean looking notification and alert emails but its a FUCKING NIGHTMARE because everyone uses either Gmail or Outlook and both handle everything so poorly and... weirdly. And oh my god having to use tables... so many tables.

Animats• 2 years ago

It's about content, not deliverability. It looks like it's intended to test whether A can email B, which would be useful. But no.

EGreg• 2 years ago

So, does Android support inserting images yet into HTML email you compose with an app, for the user to send?

It's been A DECADE NOW

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15136480/how-to-send-htm...

qwerty456127• 2 years ago

What about RoundCube, RainLoop, SquirrelMail etc?

Aachen• 2 years ago

I was also a bit disappointed by the lack of open source coverage. If someone uses proprietary crap that doesn't work, they can go cry to their vendor, but I'd like Thunderbird, K9, FairEmail, and RoundCube to work for example. Anyone is free to use these so it would be cool if emails work there

Would you be interested in adding RoundCube, FairEmail, and K9 support? Those clients I'm familiar with so I can easily load up some eml files into my IMAP server and try them out, but it's some 144 tests total and a tad much to do all alone for "fun"

isodev• 2 years ago

I love it! Designing emails is always a bit of a pain. With that said… plain text emails are so sexy ;).

dankobgd• 2 years ago

but no, we can't just write plain text, we have to put our whole website inside an email

morgunkorn• 2 years ago

Hilarious anecdote about this website: the owner once said there are tons of entries in the usage log of people misunderstanding the purpose of the website and inputting celebrities names to try to email them. :D

junon• 2 years ago

I wish there was a database of some sort for these sorts of anecdotes!

seper8• 2 years ago

canianecdote

kome• 2 years ago

that's a startup idea. and the answer to the "can i email...?" will be always a static page the says "no".

there is money to be made here.

loa_in_• 2 years ago

That's not true and a very much defeatist view. Yes, you can talk with people if they're willing to listen and maybe even respond. Yes, even if they're extremely popular already. Even if they're richer than you.

flexagoon• 2 years ago

I know for a fact that Gabe Newell, for example, reads all emails that people send him, and even responds pretty often. So I'm pretty sure other famous people do that

mamediz• 2 years ago

At first glance I was trying to figure out what this is about but, so far nothing. It's "like caniuse but for email content", ok but, what is caniuse? I don't know if it is worth but, before launching something new, I wish everyone consider to publish a brief section to explain to the average person what this is about.

idle_zealot2• 2 years ago

A fully-featured HTML "document" is really an application, not a document at all, so it makes sense that mail clients limit support. But this fragmentation makes me yearn for a real standard here, an official non-application subset of HTML that doesn't allow fetching remote resources or executing code. Just a document format with embedded media, animations, styling, etc.

social_quotient• 2 years ago

Is it a “document” if it has animations and non static (video) media?

idle_zealot2• 2 years ago

Arguably? We don't really have a standard format like that in common usage so I can't predict where people would settle on it linguistically.

joquarky• 2 years ago

PDF documents support video.

pyrale4• 2 years ago

Quite honestly, people have no business sending me code to execute or resources to fetch.

I get that adtech is interested in using my email as their billboard, but they can fuck right off. Plaintext + attachments or gtfo.

kcrwfrd_• 2 years ago

Dark mode support in email is one of the most frustrating things I’ve dealt with as a frontend dev who’s been coding since the IE6 days.

Basically you have to accept that you must only implement a light mode design and choose colors that will look okay when automatically inverted by all of the shoddy dark mode email client implementations.

Gmail is one of the worst offenders. You have zero recourse for picking your own colors for dark mode.

emmet• 2 years ago

Flashbacks to making a nice email template for a company only to find out their entire client list used outlook from a decade earlier and could just about render plaintext. There was no point in me even showing up.

mykehunt• 2 years ago

MJML is better than most but remember every templating language has a footprint.

When possible reduce your html code weight to the bare bones minimum. Nothing too fancy. Keep it logical. After a bit of practice it’s actually easy and in my opinion often faster than MJML (For example MailJet. Don’t even get me started on Klaviyo.)

Even with minimal coding/hmtl experience you can run your code through GPT-4/Bard.

Bonus for including custom instructions such as “transactional intent”, Bayesian/heuristic filtering, coded for users with poor digital accessibility, under-served internet users, etc.

Even with the best domain domain/ip reputation without a positive engagement history specific to that user you will often land in promotions/other tab and not the primary tab for new users with a heavily weighted creative.

Remember you want to mimic “an email from Grandma” while maintaining some degree of control of visual design.

Or if that’s too complicated just keep your subject line under three words and all lowercase.

Doctor_Fegg• 2 years ago

Apple Mail (iOS) : 266/284
Gmail (Android) : 111/284

Interesting corrective to the “Apple is holding back HTML” narrative that appears so often on HN.

darylteo• 2 years ago

Honestly the biggest surprise to me. How on EARTH is Apple Mail (OSX) top!

ktosobcy5• 2 years ago

I would love for a middle-ground to emerge - plain-text emails with rudimentary formatting and ability to inline images. Something like markdown/asciidoc would be fine for overwhelming majority of cases. Unfortunately we ended up in a world where HTML email is a commonplace…

EyebrowsWhite• 2 years ago

I use plain text, and I even enable "block external image" on the client, and I would advise others to do the same, because there is just too much phishing with email..

sachahjkl• 2 years ago

Tuta.com not here :(

kwhitefoot• 2 years ago

No Thunderbird on Linux, Windows, etc.? Is it different on MacOS?

jpecar• 2 years ago

Soooooo happy that my mail client is not even on the list here. It automatically strips out anything remotely looking like html and it sends out plain text emails only, as email was designed to be and should still be.

Anyone sending me css garbage will be directed to /dev/null. Thanks.

mike31fr• 2 years ago

Reminds me of someone I knew 15 years ago, who often said "Anyone sending me text messages with abbreviations doesn't deserve a response". Sadly, now this guy has hardly any friends.

tormeh• 2 years ago

Text messages with abbreviations come from real people. Emails with HTML and CSS are almost all automated, and usually some kind of spam.

(Some email clients for humans probably add a bit of html and css to everything, but you get what I mean. It still looks like plain text)

pembrook• 2 years ago

Have you ever come across the insanely rare use case of wanting to put something in italic or bold?

Or even more insane, maybe wanting to add a link in an email?

Or, you ever purchase anything online? It’s kind of nice to have line items in receipts and an image of the thing I bought. But then again, I’m an irrational human who enjoys things like “aesthetic readability.”

As a true purist, do you also exclusively program in Machine code? Because that’s how all software was originally designed to be.

Seems silly to get religious about it.

Aissen• 2 years ago

Nice to find privacy leaking clients: https://www.caniemail.com/features/css-pseudo-class-visited/

EduardoBautista• 2 years ago

How would this be privacy leaking? Wouldn't only the email viewer be able to see the result of using :visited?

nedt4• 2 years ago

You could just load a different (invisible) background image based on the visited state to send out a ping.

dustedcodes2• 2 years ago

I can't figure out how to use it.

When I enter "<a href="https://example.org>Test</a>" it says "No results found. Why not suggest this feature to be added?".

When I enter "<a>" I get "AMP for email", "BIMI", "accent-color" and lots of other CSS attributes starting with "a" as result.

When I enter "a" I get the same as above.

How do I check if I can email the HTML Anchor tag? The input says "HTML, CSS, ..." but it doesn't seem to understand HTML unless I'm doing it wrong?

nedt4• 2 years ago

You might have been unlucky searching for the a element that's really short. And very basic HTML would work everywhere. But you might be more happy to go via the feature list: https://www.caniemail.com/features/

dustedcodes2• 2 years ago

LOL ok that was just a really unfortunate coincidence. I used the <a> tag because I knew it would/should be supported everywhere so wanted to test the website with an input where I know what response to expect :)

pabs3• 2 years ago

Hmm, no mention of JavaScript or remote resources, nor any of the Linux clients.

asddubs• 2 years ago

do any email clients support js?

silon42• 2 years ago

I hope not.

gtirloni• 2 years ago

The compare email clients option got me confused. I select Thunderbird and Apple Mail and didn't get a list of differences.

throw4847285• 2 years ago

I can't be the only person disappointed that this isn't Caninemail.com, can I?

palata3• 2 years ago

I like plaintext better (https://useplaintext.email/).

And emails can totally be sent both as plaintext and HTML, so that the receiver can choose! I just don't understand why so many services only send a text/html version instead of both text/html and text/plain.

Liskni_si2• 2 years ago

Quite a lot of services send both… and the text/plain version is completely different. They used to be the same many years ago, but then whoever is in charge of changing the email template only changes the text/html variant, and keeps the text/plain content stuck in the old times. It'd be almost funny if it wasn't tragic.

palata3• 2 years ago

Agreed. But a lot of services don't even send plaintext anymore. Public services generally don't, in my country. And that's a shame.

Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

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