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October 21, 2021
Today I read a post by Ploum [1] about "The Monstrosity Email Has Become" [2] and I couldn't agree more. His post touches on mostly backend stuff and protocols for making email work and a little bit about the end user experience.
I want to comment on the end user experience from my perspective. I don't know a whole lot about the backend server stuff, just a little, but I sure have lot's of experience as an end-user.
I like to keep it simple. What I prefer is plain text both incoming and outgoing. It's easy to read and it doesn't have to be cluttered with a lot of junk html and javascript.
As Ploum mentioned we get a lot of spam and legitamite junk mail from companies we've done business with at one time or another. Almost 100% of the time those legit junk emails are in html and have background trackers looking to see if you opened the email or not. They're also loading images and other stuff as well.
There is one exception, and a surprising one, in my experience where I can opt for plain text emails from a company. That's Amazon. Yeah, that's right, Amazon. I don't remember where in my account settings I found it, but it's in there where you can opt for plain text or html emails from them. Once I discovered it a while back I opted for plain text. So anytime I order something, or get a different email from Amazon, it's in plain text and I love it.
I've used Neomutt in the past and recently played with Himalaya. I like them. I love termianl applications of all sorts and have mentioned it in other posts before.
The problem with them is not so much them at all, but rather with me and the companies or websites we interact with. Most all of them want to track us and show all sorts of images and flashy things in our inboxes. There is usually no plain text option with them. So if you use a terminal email client, it will show it in plaintext, but also littered with the html normally hidden in a standard email client, thus breaking up the flow of reading the email.
Now this isn't really a problem per se with personal corrospondence as most of use just write words and don't embed all sorts of other junk with it.
My problem is that I have 99% legit junk that comes in and 1% personal email that comes in. So that means my inbox is filled with html and javascript junk making plaintext email clients not as fun to use.
I have one or two email newsletters that I actually read and quite enjoy. But I sure wish I could get them in plain text. Looking at them in Neomutt is just as irritating as it is in a normal email client. So if I want to keep reading them, I have to suffer just a little bit each time.
This would probably never happen on a wide-scale basis, but I can dream. I think it would be nice to have a standard format for how to compose an email. That email would obviously be plain text of course. But I think, and I'm just rattling this off as I think and type here, that if there are any links to sites to be included in the email, they should be listed in order of mention at the bottom of the email. I believe Neomutt does this a bit and that's nice, but those html emails also litter the body of the email with the links as well.
We have a pretty good alternative solution to the web with Gemini and Gopher and many of us are on board with them. But fixing the email system and habits is a far more difficult task and one that I doubt will ever be close to what I'd like it to be.
Alas, I'm only one person and getting big and small companies, and even the normies out there to offer, let alone comply with, a plain text email alternative to what they send out is a pipe dream.
The Monstrosity Email Has Become