Use Plain Text Email
49 comments
·June 28, 2025rsync
layer8
Similar here with Mutt. And I’m happy to report that most emails still come with a text/plain part and don’t force you to use an HTML rendering fallback.
beached_whale
Another thing, set your mail readers to never automatically download images. This prevents the senders from knowing if/when/where from/and how often you read their message. There's always a button to download the linked images but its suprising how often it isn't needed. I do wish more mail clients had allow and deny lists for this function.
Bender
And also disable MDN's [1] in stand-alone email clients and discard them in MTA's if your user-base is cool with it.
# grep MDN /etc/postfix/header_checks change WARN* to discard to drop them.
/^Subject: MDN: / WARN MDN_Seen_1000
/^Subject: Read-Receipt-To: / WARN MDN_Seen_1001
/^Subject: Disposition-Notification-To: / WARN MDN_Seen_1002
/^Message-ID: \<receipt/ WARN MDN_Seen_1003
/^Subject: Read: / WARN MDN_Seen_1004
beached_whale
ooh good point, I ensure read receipts are disabled too. What a bad feature these days.
mike-cardwell
And use https://www.emailprivacytester.com to test that your email client is configured correctly
beached_whale
ERR connection refused like error. I guess gmail doesn't like them
mike-cardwell
Sorry about that. Try again now
SoftTalker
While I greatly prefer plain text email, trimming quoted text that isn't relevant to the reply, and replying inline rather than top-posting, all the major email clients discourage this, or at least don't make it easy by default, so it's a lost cause in 2025 (and was lost long before today).
antisol
It's only a lost cause if you decide to let it be.
Plain text email continues to work just fine for me every day.
dsr_
I have not had problems doing it for the last 35 years, so if you are using terrible tools, you should probably fix that.
SoftTalker
You misunderstood, or I wasn't very clear. I have and use good email tools. I only meant that the crusade to get everyone else to follow is lost.
I am the one oddball in my office who doesn't use Outlook and who sends plain-text emails with ">" prefixed quotes. But I'm under no illusions that anyone else is going to be convinced, and I no longer make any effort to try.
leakycap
Modern email clients are getting too clever for their own good, and I have no choice on what client others use.
For decades, inline replies worked perfectly—you'd quote the relevant part and respond right underneath it. But now email apps are "helping" by trimming messages into compact views, cutting off replies right at the first quoted section unless someone taps "show more."
I've basically abandoned inline replied and have gone back to dumping everything at the top like it's 1995.
The irony is these apps think they're making email better by hiding "clutter," but they're actually making conversations harder to follow.
8n4vidtmkvmk
I wrote a tool for my boss years ago that would reformat emails for plain text and put those arrows and fix the indentation. He loved it so much. Older gentleman. I guess that's how he did it in his day and never saw the need to change. Glad I could make him happy with like 1 day of work. Tiny app.
alkonaut
Making more than a completely negligible group of people change tools - or even the settings of their tools - is what’s a lost cause.
The easiest way for this crusade to succeed would be to take aim at Outlook and Gmail and try to make them change defaults.
zahlman
For Proton users:
> Visit Settings → Appearance
> Set "Composer Mode" to "Plain Text"
This is out of date; the setting is now in "Messages and Composing" (after a break), not in "Appearance". (You'll have to scroll down a fair bit.)
F3nd0
The main problem I always encountered when sending plan-text e-mails was quote formatting. The 72-character limit works well enough for my own reply, but when the quoted replies already consist of 72-character lines, adding several levels of indentation can break those up and mess up the formatting, since the client doesn’t extend the character limit for the quoted parts, resulting in something like this:
> > > Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do
eiusmod
> > > tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
Leaving it like that annoys me, while fixing it by hand gets tedious very fast. I suppose some clients might know how to handle this automatically, but I’ve never had the fortune of using one. (And frankly, plain-text formatting is not among my most important criteria when choosing an e-mail client.)
As many gotchas as HTML e-mail might have in practice, I find the basic idea of giving messages semantic structure make a whole lot of sense. And as for top posting, I understand the criticism, but I find it very suitable for straightforward, back-and-forth exchanges, which comprise a decent part of my e-mail communication. So overall, I can’t say I’m entirely sold on plain-text e-mail.
tonymet
i made a sendmail CLI for sending plain text mail using gmail and outlook REST APIs.
Gmail’s smtp gateway breaks plaintext formatting, restmail preserves it.
alkonaut
Hard no.
Use whatever format and formatting your recipient wants. What they want is just a function of what client they use. If you are in an Outlook organization then just do whatever outlook does.
If you send to an external recipient you’ll need to guess, but if the recipient is at a medium to large corporation, chances are it’s Outlook there too.
And it’s not that people with html clients can’t read plaintext. It’s that it just looks odd to the recipient.
Once every 10000 emails I send something to one of the ”technical communities” mentioned. I can switch to plaintext then, or bottom/inline reply etc - because they expect or require it. But switching outright because a tiny group of niche techies find it a good idea? No, sorry. Email was eaten by gmail and Outlook and the only chance to change anything would be if their defaults changed (which isn’t happening).
Rotundo
I disagree with you vehemently.
The recipient will get what I deem to be appropriate. I will not, ever, stoop to the lowest common denominator of giving in to the tyranny of Outlook and its ilk.
I'm sending text, not a complete website to the recipient.
rsync
Both you, and your parent, should consider changing your view in favor of Postel's law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
"... be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept ..."
F3nd0
On the other hand, it's perfectly reasonable not to give up the choice that you prefer and consider superior in many ways, just because ‘e-mail was eaten by Gmail and Outlook’. In fact, I personally feel great aversion to those two services and strongly dislike the idea of letting them dictate the way I use an open standard. If that was my main reason for ever using HTML e-mail (which, thankfully, it's not), I'd really rather just send plain text and have it look odd to the recipient.
mr_mitm
Well, I as a recipient want plain text.
sneak
I prefer plain text email, but this cranky unix-user anti-features tradition is a bad thing. Discord won over IRC because the people who make IRC clients and servers think the world in 1999 was the pinnacle of engineering. It wasn’t.
Rich text emails are great. So are variable-width fonts.
kevincox
Yeah, the occasional bold word, inline link, heading or even the occasional image can make a message much more readable. If you don't like bold words your client can ignore that tag.
I think this is partly an over-reaction to some senders that go way overboard with bright colours a hundred images and complex layout that doesn't render right on your screen size. But just because a capability can be used poorly doesn't mean that it can't be used well.
I can also understand that some people choose to prefer the text version of messages because it is so common to "abuse" HTML. And for those people I even include a text fallback in case their client doesn't have the ability to do that.
ChrisArchitect
Some previous discussions:
2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39033046
wazoox
I do and always did, but it's quite frequent that people call me on my weird emails (no colours ? no formatting ? weird !). It's a completely lost cause unfortunately in this eternal September.
nailer
Why would I limit proper display of my email to 78 character wide monospace devices?
mr_mitm
They go into that at length in section 4.
geor9e
Switch your display to greyscale. Disable javascript in your browser. When someone sends you a meme, instead of clicking X to dismiss the facebook login popup and see the public page, reply "sorry, I don't have facebook". Become insufferable.
leakycap
> instead of clicking X to close the facebook login popup, reply "sorry, I don't have facebook"
Never send facebook links, problem solved. It's poor form.
The little "X" you refer to is rarely there for those of us who don't ever log in.
wazoox
But I don't have Facebook. The worst is the incessant "call me back on WhatsApp". I don't use any of this crap.
I use alpine, exclusively, for my personal and work emails.
It's beautiful, lightweight, efficient and can perform complex operations with keystrokes. Phishing URLs are glaringly obvious, I can quickly view full headers with a press of 'H', and no network traffic (trackers, pixels, counters) is generated by my interaction with the email.
There's one other thing:
If your mailtool runs over SSH and you send email to someone else running their mailtool over SSH on the same system ... the mail delivery is a local copy operation.
Which is to say: no rsync.net internal email has ever traversed a network.
That's nice.