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.
layer8 · 1h ago
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.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
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).
yoz-y · 21m ago
My heart sank when I inline replied to a long email from a clinic, only to get a reply that “you only said hello and your message is empty”.
I don’t know what client they are using, or if they never received a properly formatter reply in their life.
antisol · 2h ago
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_ · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
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.
jolmg · 2h ago
You can still make the decision whether to top-post or inline-post based on your recipient. Programmer's mailing list -> inline post. Family member -> top post. You can send a stranger an inline post, somehow confirm they were able to view it, and include them in your mental whitelist of people that understand inline posting.
Kind of like how one adjusts their language / choice of words / choice of topics based on their recipient.
leakycap · 1h ago
No one except fellow older tech heads seem to speak in the old ways
F3nd0 · 1h ago
A possible work-around that comes to mind is always prefixing your reply with some form of ‘(reply below)’.
8n4vidtmkvmk · 1h ago
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 · 2h ago
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.
beached_whale · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
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.
Why though? Sometimes it is useful to know whether the mail got delivered, i.e. for handing in assignments. Also the read notification is only sent on recipient wish.
beached_whale · 26m ago
you cannot depend on it and trackers/scammers/... use it as a way to see if your address is actually alive or not.
Bender · 24m ago
DSN's Delivery Status Notifications are absolutely useful otherwise they never would have been created. Read-replies and out of office auto-replies that reply to non corporate primary domains are used to validate email addresses for spammers. Even DSN's can be abused this way. Older versions of Exchange would not limit out-of-office replies to the corporate domains.
One can drop read-replies and even out-of-office auto-replies without dropping specific DSN's. It is up to each organization how they wish to handle these. Some financial institutions will go full BOFH Bastard Operator from Hell, like me and some will cherry pick what goes through such as limiting responses to employees. Some will let everything through to justify the purchase of their anti-spam, anti-malware third party service. I was brought into existence in the 2150th level of hell.
So that is the cool thing about such rules is that one can cherry pick whichever meets the needs and requirements of their organization and this is just the beginning of what one can do. The first step in this process is to enable logging of Subjects, Attachment Names / Sizes, FCrDNS and others to syslog then start building reports to see what is leaking out of ones organization and what nonsense is flooding ones organization. Some DLP's Data Loss Prevention appliances can do some of this too but they can be pricey and may leak data to yet another third party. As a proper BOFH I keep logs in-house. Logging to a third party can get extra painful with newer privacy laws in some countries.
I always front-end exchange servers with multiple Postfix servers with large queues so that work can be done without losing things, extra logging can be enabled and extra anti-spam capabilities can be enabled or added.
beached_whale · 1h ago
ooh good point, I ensure read receipts are disabled too. What a bad feature these days.
ERR connection refused like error. I guess gmail doesn't like them
mike-cardwell · 1h ago
Sorry about that. Try again now
xyst · 54m ago
What’s interesting to see here is Apple’s "Protect Mail Activity" option working as advertised.
Loading images through their servers and throwing off the tracking software.
beached_whale · 25m ago
It still says you loaded it though.
F3nd0 · 2h ago
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.
layer8 · 1h ago
With terminal-based email programs, you can usually configure your favorite editor for email authoring. And Vim, for example, comes with support for handling email quotes appropriately when using the (paragraph) text formatting commands like gq [0].
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 · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
Both you, and your parent, should consider changing your view in favor of Postel's law:
"... be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept ..."
F3nd0 · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
Well, I as a recipient want plain text.
geor9e · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
> 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 · 1h ago
But I don't have Facebook. The worst is the incessant "call me back on WhatsApp". I don't use any of this crap.
mattl · 33m ago
What do you use? Not saying for a moment that anyone needs to use Facebook, but I'm curious if you use anything else...
nailer · 2h ago
Why would I limit proper display of my email to 78 character wide monospace devices?
skydhash · 26m ago
I think mobile viewing and most marketing email is around that limit. So not really a hard choice to make.
mr_mitm · 1h ago
They go into that at length in section 4.
sneak · 2h ago
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 · 1h ago
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.
pomatic · 56m ago
I'm sure markdown email has been done? But just didn't gain traction?
jaffa2 · 33m ago
Mailmate on macos solves this very nicely. As a bonus my html mails have never looked better and i get the bonus of writing in text using markdown . Currently evaluating it.
encom · 40m ago
>1999 was the pinnacle of engineering
Typing words to strangers online, worked just as well using IRC in 1999 as it does today. However my issue with Discord isn't the rich text, it's that Discord is a proprietary, centralised, CIA honeypot and a garbage company. Their Electron client is the least of their sins.
>Rich text emails are great.
They can be. They usually aren't. Yesterday I got a marketing email from an electricity provider. The unsubscribe link was 1302 characters of obfuscated Sendgrid bullshit. And it was full of tracking images and all links had click tracking. I wonder how this crap is GDPR compliant, because I'm fairly sure I never consented to any of this.
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.
kelnos · 2h ago
I used to care about this, but these days it just seem pointless, and I just can't summon a slice of my limited energy for attention to care about this. I also find many of the reasons listed to be somewhat irrelevant:
> HTML as a vector for phishing
> Privacy invasion and tracking
> Higher incidence of spam
> Mail client vulnerabilities
These are all potentially reasons to disable the display of HTML email in your own mail client, but they aren't a reason not to send HTML email. As a sender, I know I'm not trying to phish my recipient, or invade their privacy or track them, or spam them, or try to trigger a mail client vulnerability. So these just don't matter.
From the recipient's point of view, many people receive HTML emails (that don't have an embedded plain-text alternative), and actually do need to read those emails. The kind of person who doesn't, likely already is a firm believer in plain-text-only and doesn't need to be convinced.
And other reasons seem dubious:
> HTML emails are less accessible
This is odd, because HTML has accessibility features built into it. Certainly a bunch of plain text is easier for a screen reader to deal with, but only if the sender doesn't care about conveying formatting or nuance at all. Later in the piece, the author suggests using asterisks, underscores, etc. to indicate bold/italic/etc., but I expect screen readers don't know what that's supposed to mean, so using such a thing will make your emails less accessible, not more.
> Some clients can't display HTML emails at all
The kind of people who use mail clients that can't display HTML email at all are probably not in your target audience if you are going to send HTML email. If people like that have deliberately chosen to use software that can't display everything out there, that's their choice, and they can deal with the consequences.
And anyway:
> In a text-only interface it's not possible to render an HTML email, and instead the reader will just see a mess of raw HTML text.
Then that's a missing feature in the terminal mail reader. If lynx and links can render HTML to a terminal in a useful, readable way, a mail reader can do so too.
> A lot of people simply send HTML emails directly to spam for this reason.
"A lot" is doing a bit of work there. I guess "a lot" of people in the author's small bubble?
> Rich text isn't that great, anyway
That's opinion, not fact, and reasonable people can reasonably disagree. I happen to be one of them. I actually don't use much in the way of text styling in my emails, but it's nice to have the option, and as someone who does sometimes receive actually-useful, non-spam HTML emails, the presentation/styling often does add to the experience, not detract.
bitwize · 1h ago
"How about you use a mail client from this century." --the IT guy from a former job
mattl · 3h ago
Weird omission of some clients like Thunderbird from the list.
daneel_w · 2h ago
Given the unfathomably bloated mess the desktop issue has become it doesn't entirely belong in the list of recommended clients.
mattl · 2h ago
There’s no other cross platform GUI client I can think of.
I don’t think you’re going to get many people switching from mail.google.com to something in a terminal emulator straight away.
zahlman · 2h ago
The recommendations list is described thus:
> These clients all compose plain text emails by default, with correct quoting and text wrapping settings, requiring no additional configuration to use correctly.
Thunderbird is not in the list because it requires configuration.
The recommended list includes several GUIs and web clients.
johnklos · 2h ago
Thunderbird is basically a web browser that executes whatever you want it to.
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.
I don’t know what client they are using, or if they never received a properly formatter reply in their life.
Plain text email continues to work just fine for me every day.
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.
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.
Kind of like how one adjusts their language / choice of words / choice of topics based on their recipient.
The easiest way for this crusade to succeed would be to take aim at Outlook and Gmail and try to make them change defaults.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_receipt
One can drop read-replies and even out-of-office auto-replies without dropping specific DSN's. It is up to each organization how they wish to handle these. Some financial institutions will go full BOFH Bastard Operator from Hell, like me and some will cherry pick what goes through such as limiting responses to employees. Some will let everything through to justify the purchase of their anti-spam, anti-malware third party service. I was brought into existence in the 2150th level of hell.
So that is the cool thing about such rules is that one can cherry pick whichever meets the needs and requirements of their organization and this is just the beginning of what one can do. The first step in this process is to enable logging of Subjects, Attachment Names / Sizes, FCrDNS and others to syslog then start building reports to see what is leaking out of ones organization and what nonsense is flooding ones organization. Some DLP's Data Loss Prevention appliances can do some of this too but they can be pricey and may leak data to yet another third party. As a proper BOFH I keep logs in-house. Logging to a third party can get extra painful with newer privacy laws in some countries.
I always front-end exchange servers with multiple Postfix servers with large queues so that work can be done without losing things, extra logging can be enabled and extra anti-spam capabilities can be enabled or added.
Loading images through their servers and throwing off the tracking software.
> > > 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.
[0] https://vimhelp.org/change.txt.html#formatting
> 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.)
Gmail’s smtp gateway breaks plaintext formatting, restmail preserves it.
https://github.com/tonymet/restmail
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).
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
"... be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept ..."
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.
Rich text emails are great. So are variable-width fonts.
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.
Typing words to strangers online, worked just as well using IRC in 1999 as it does today. However my issue with Discord isn't the rich text, it's that Discord is a proprietary, centralised, CIA honeypot and a garbage company. Their Electron client is the least of their sins.
>Rich text emails are great.
They can be. They usually aren't. Yesterday I got a marketing email from an electricity provider. The unsubscribe link was 1302 characters of obfuscated Sendgrid bullshit. And it was full of tracking images and all links had click tracking. I wonder how this crap is GDPR compliant, because I'm fairly sure I never consented to any of this.
2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39033046
2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32810515
2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20513987
> HTML as a vector for phishing
> Privacy invasion and tracking
> Higher incidence of spam
> Mail client vulnerabilities
These are all potentially reasons to disable the display of HTML email in your own mail client, but they aren't a reason not to send HTML email. As a sender, I know I'm not trying to phish my recipient, or invade their privacy or track them, or spam them, or try to trigger a mail client vulnerability. So these just don't matter.
From the recipient's point of view, many people receive HTML emails (that don't have an embedded plain-text alternative), and actually do need to read those emails. The kind of person who doesn't, likely already is a firm believer in plain-text-only and doesn't need to be convinced.
And other reasons seem dubious:
> HTML emails are less accessible
This is odd, because HTML has accessibility features built into it. Certainly a bunch of plain text is easier for a screen reader to deal with, but only if the sender doesn't care about conveying formatting or nuance at all. Later in the piece, the author suggests using asterisks, underscores, etc. to indicate bold/italic/etc., but I expect screen readers don't know what that's supposed to mean, so using such a thing will make your emails less accessible, not more.
> Some clients can't display HTML emails at all
The kind of people who use mail clients that can't display HTML email at all are probably not in your target audience if you are going to send HTML email. If people like that have deliberately chosen to use software that can't display everything out there, that's their choice, and they can deal with the consequences.
And anyway:
> In a text-only interface it's not possible to render an HTML email, and instead the reader will just see a mess of raw HTML text.
Then that's a missing feature in the terminal mail reader. If lynx and links can render HTML to a terminal in a useful, readable way, a mail reader can do so too.
> A lot of people simply send HTML emails directly to spam for this reason.
"A lot" is doing a bit of work there. I guess "a lot" of people in the author's small bubble?
> Rich text isn't that great, anyway
That's opinion, not fact, and reasonable people can reasonably disagree. I happen to be one of them. I actually don't use much in the way of text styling in my emails, but it's nice to have the option, and as someone who does sometimes receive actually-useful, non-spam HTML emails, the presentation/styling often does add to the experience, not detract.
* https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/download.html
Compare those to https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/all
I can't find a current download for modern macOS on either of the first two
I don’t think you’re going to get many people switching from mail.google.com to something in a terminal emulator straight away.
> These clients all compose plain text emails by default, with correct quoting and text wrapping settings, requiring no additional configuration to use correctly.
Thunderbird is not in the list because it requires configuration.
The recommended list includes several GUIs and web clients.