Use plaintext email

> Rich text features desirable for end users include things like inline images, bold or italicized text, and so on. However, the tradeoff isn't worth it. Images can simply be attached to your email, and you can employ things like asterisks, /slashes/, _underscores_, or UPPERCASE for emphasis. Well, why bother writing his own post in rich text then? He has headings, bold, links, grey font at the bottom, image. Don't get me wrong - for high security systems/environments, plaintext is…

> HTML emails are mainly used for marketing - that is, emails you probably don't want to see in the first place. The few advantages they offer for end-users, such as links, inline images, and bold or italic text, aren't worth the trade-off. Inline images are a huge, huge advantage, especially for internal business communications where an email may be the only real documentation of a problem and its solution. (Or at least the only documentation that can stand on…

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…

This may be useful if you're purposely setting up to participate somewhere with anachronistic rules, as it gives a nice list of clients and configuration settings to get things working. But for general email communication the ship sailed many years ago and most people expect the ability to embed photos, tables, lists, and text formatting directly into messages so we can better communicate our intent using modern tools, without writing 'source code' to do it, even that as simple as…