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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you don’t like the emails your electricity provider sends you, don’t give them your email address, or filter all of their emails to the trash.
Rich text emails as a format and as a feature are great. If you don’t like the content of emails that doesn’t change the issue at all. In the alternative you are proposing, the unsubscribe link isn’t clickable at all.
(I also dislike Discord for many of the same reasons, but it won because it is better for users, because it has more features. Your complaints about it, which I share, are irrelevant to this discussion.)
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.
This is kinda why "format=flowed" exists, if things fit on the screen, even deeply nested quotes remain readable if there's enough space. And vice versa, people on their phones can still read the text, albeit still to the extent that things can fit. No weird hard wrapping or stray words that could've fit at least.
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].
I work for one of those “evil” email software companies. Part of our business is external marketing and the much larger part of our business is internal employee communications. For over 15 years we kept track of the number of people who used HTML emails and the number of people who opted for plain text emails. It was something in the realm of 0.1% of all mail recipients had opted for plain text. That was in 2015. Today, that number would probably be even lower. So we stopped offering multipart emails entirely because the cost/benefit analysis doesn’t add up.
HTML emails aren’t sent only because that’s what the senders want. They are sent because that’s what the recipients want.
Mobile is often less than that and any hard wrapping looks absolutely horrid. I mean, hard wrapping in general looks disgusting on anything besides an ancient VT-80, but it looks extra bad on mobile. Only tolerable option for plain text is "format=flowed".
While I wholeheartedly agree with all of this, I feel like this ship may have sailed a very long time ago. Does it really make sense to continue fighting html email?
Readit News
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 have received some messages that don't, but in some cases the HTML is written clearly so that the message is still easily readable despite that.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_receipt
Loading images through their servers and throwing off the tracking software.
Plain text email continues to work just fine for me every day.
I don’t know what client they are using, or if they never received a properly formatter reply in their life.
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.
The easiest way for this crusade to succeed would be to take aim at Outlook and Gmail and try to make them change defaults.
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.
Rich text emails as a format and as a feature are great. If you don’t like the content of emails that doesn’t change the issue at all. In the alternative you are proposing, the unsubscribe link isn’t clickable at all.
(I also dislike Discord for many of the same reasons, but it won because it is better for users, because it has more features. Your complaints about it, which I share, are irrelevant to this discussion.)
> > > 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
HTML emails aren’t sent only because that’s what the senders want. They are sent because that’s what the recipients want.