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Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

candiddevmike
65 replies
21h36m

IMO, HTML was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content is the best content.

StableAlkyne
17 replies
20h43m

That's a completely valid opinion, and I prefer plaintext as well

But at this point, it's pretty clear that most non-technical people prefer emails with fancy text and graphics.

Personally, I'm just glad that email is a flexible enough medium to allow that. It's better than the alternative, where people moved to some closed, proprietary protocol behind like 20 patents that allows the same thing.

Is there any other common way we communicate over screens (aside from http) that has had the staying power of email for the general public? I think that's a testament to the sheer flexibility of it. The ugliness that people have contorted email into is a badge of honor IMO

throw0101c
11 replies
19h50m

But at this point, it's pretty clear that most non-technical people prefer emails with fancy text and graphics.

And what percentage of e-mails from people / human beings have those things?

Certainly marketing e-mails have fancy formats, but I've rarely seen any person at a companies I've worked at use any kind of formatting: generally most folks hit reply and start typing with whatever the default is. Hardly any italics or bold, and forget about fixed width (for things like CLI commands in technical discussions).

Heck, even Slack messages these styles are hardly used (on my current team I use them the most since I know that Markdown so it's easy for me to throw in some **, //, or `` in my typing flow, so I can highlight hostnames, CLI commands, etc).

wrycoder
3 replies
19h6m

My wife has a fastmail account, but she uses her iMail client, so she can send inline photos with her email. Even FM can’t do that yet.

brongondwana
2 replies
18h46m

Huh? You can paste if you have an image in your buffer, or drag-drop image files into an email in the Fastmail composer. I paste images into emails from screenshots almost every day.

(I'll take this report as a "we need to make it clearer you can do this!")

luckman212
1 replies
15h46m

Very happy Fastmail user here! Would love if images could be resized in the webapp. For some reason most screenshots I paste in get scaled up to a very unwieldy size.

brongondwana
0 replies
8h29m

Yeah, this is a common request :) I've added your prod to the "this is common" data

yau8edq12i
2 replies
15h1m

You must be joking. I write and receive emails containing lists, hyperlinks, or blockquotes all the time. I don't need the last flexbox technology, but some formatting is important.

throw0101c
0 replies
5h5m

You must be joking. I write and receive emails containing lists, hyperlinks, or blockquotes all the time.

I am not.

I don't receive e-mails with fancy formatting at all. As for hyperlinks: I can paste a URL just fine without an <A HREF…> tag.

sbuk
0 replies
14h6m

There is always Rich Text…

Semaphor
2 replies
18h31m

If plain text would support inline-images, I’d probably be okay with it. But it doesn’t, so I’m not.

I also generally prefer structured formatting to plain text.

bregma
1 replies
11h4m

They say an image is worth 1000 words.

If you're sending emails with thousands of words you have probably chosen the wrong medium.

Semaphor
0 replies
10h56m

And sometimes 22 can already be too many.

gertop
0 replies
19h21m

Any e-commerce email showing you pictures of what you bought. People tend to find this convenient.

dzhiurgis
4 replies
19h3m

My guess SMS (and similar) (by volume) are more frequent than email.

Anecdotally, I only get 2-3 actual human emails per _year_. Rest is transactional spam.

kiwijamo
3 replies
17h54m

That's you. My work emails receives 25-50 real human a day. I get less than that amount in SMS in an whole year on my work phone. Even my personal email is significantly more email than SMS. SMS is dying and replaced with messengers e.g. Teams, Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger etc.

dzhiurgis
2 replies
16h25m

No u.

I understand if you are manager/owner you might be running comms via email. But internally all of that went to slack for good reason - lack of history is a feature, not a bug.

carbonatom
1 replies
10h35m

I understand if you are manager/owner you might be running comms via email. But internally all of that went to slack for good reason - lack of history is a feature, not a bug.

I am neither manager nor owner. Just another 1x engineer. 75% of my comms run over email. 25% over Jabber.

Not every software company uses Slack!

dzhiurgis
0 replies
9h14m

Well you are not op to begin with and admit running a chat app which is has 99% chance of having better UX than email.

Email is good for having common interface. In my case it's ~abused in 99% of cases.

Also - you do not mention how much non-comms emails do you receive. While chat apps are fucky in terms of lock-in, lack of interop and tons of other things, lack of spam is nice.

astrodust
15 replies
21h12m

It's easy to say this, but can you imagine the hodge-podge of proprietary garbage we'd have to deal with if you couldn't email a simple file attachment to someone?

hollerith
8 replies
21h0m

I'm confused. How is HTML needed to attach a file (or to open the attachment)?

astrodust
7 replies
20h18m

MIME is needed, and with MIME, HTML is basically right there, so people are going to use it.

hollerith
6 replies
19h58m

HTML is not needed for attachments to work. If the government for example, banned all use of HTML in emails, people could still attach (non-HTML) files to emails the same way they do now. Therefore the comment I replied to, a defense of HTML in emails, is a bogus argument.

anamexis
3 replies
19h54m

The point is that attachments are needed to make HTML work. If you have attachments, you have HTML emails.

throw0101c
2 replies
19h47m

The point is that attachments are needed to make HTML work.

They are not.

MIME headers are helpful for telling MUAs what the content (type and/or disposition) of a message is, but there's nothing from stoping mail clients from just putting "raw" HTML in the body of an e-mail message without MIME.

anamexis
1 replies
19h43m

Yes, obviously you could just email HTML before MIME existed. That's not the point of the discussion at hand.

hollerith
0 replies
19h14m

This is bad logic, and so is your comment upthread, IMHO.

astrodust
1 replies
5h49m

"I think HTML sucks" is a bogus argument.

Why not HTML? At least it isn't RTF or some wonky SGML evolutionary dead-end.

hollerith
0 replies
1h56m

A browser engine is necessary to render an HTML email, and browser engines have large attack surfaces -- and in general they are very complicated, which makes them difficult to reason about.

Also, normies don't write HTML, but rather they depend on services (like Gmail) offered by corporations to transform their composition into HTML, which gives the corporations and avenue to track me or to try to persuade or influence me unless I want to respond by instructing my normie friend never to send me email.

In general, HTML email brings the privacy and security problems of the web to email.

Also, HTML makes email much harder to archive because an HTML document's legibility often depends on references (embedded in the HTML document) to files on the internet, and these references to online files tend to rot.

Some of us are tired of web tech spreading its tentacles everywhere, especially to technologies like email that were already useful and mature before web tech started spreading to them.

feikname
1 replies
20h49m

Email attachments are defined through MIME and don't depend at all on HTML being available as a Content-Type. We could well have had another format and attachments together.

djbusby
0 replies
19h58m

Yea! `text/rtf` FTW!

candiddevmike
1 replies
21h6m

I think that hodge podge (OneDrive, Google drive, Dropbox, etc) is what most people already use. "Simple file attachments" are an oxymoron these days--size/extension restrictions, spam scores, not to mention the hell of iterating over email.

kiwijamo
0 replies
17h51m

Depends on your use case. Sometimes I want to send a document and not have the receiver change it at their whims. E.g. quotes for jobs. Simple attachments are great for that. Also I find some people who aren't good with tech find attachments much easier to deal with. If I send a an attachment I am 100% confident the other person can open it. No so for sharing links etc.

smsm42
0 replies
21h2m

I'm good with attachment when you need to send me a real document, but if the email text itself ends up being multi-megabyte blob because you absolutely must have your name in the signature in blue and italic, then I tend to frown upon this. Over decades of my work I probably sent thousands of emails, yet very rarely if ever I needed HTML capabilities, and pretty much never ones that go beyond very basic Markup formatting.

arjvik
0 replies
21h9m

Can still do plain text with attachments... unless you expect that companies would move to emailing you HTML files of their message?

lelanthran
11 replies
15h4m

IMO, HTML was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content is the best content.

Your first statement might be true (it's debatable). Your second is definitely false.

Lets assume that HTML really was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content for email is still not the best content.

People want to:

1. Click on a link in the email, not fumble with copy and paste on their phone.

2. See decently formatted paragraphs and content with bold, italics and different font sizes for headings and paragraphs, not a wall of text.

3. See images in the email itself, not have to once again fumble around with copy and paste.

4. Correctly formatted bullet points, including sub-lists.

For all of the above, some sort of format is required. If we exclude HTML as a possibility, you're still going to have to need a format of some type, because the wall-o-text format is not a good UI.

ivanjermakov
4 replies
14h1m

Regarding 1. it's up to the client to parse and highlight links in plain text.

lelanthran
3 replies
13h51m

Regarding 1. it's up to the client to parse and highlight links in plain text.

If the client is interpreting the content and then displaying its interpretation to the user, then it's not plain text anymore, is it? It's a format; in this case it's a poorly-specified, ad-hoc format and broken format[1] that is worse than simply having a reduced ad-hoc HTML format.

Just like HTML is "plain text" which is interpreted by the client and that interpretation is displayed to the user.

[1] For example, what if the sender types in `You should go to http://ww.example.com, where "example" must be replaced with your company name`? Suddenly `www.example.com` has an unintended DDoS!

lelanthran
0 replies
4h21m

What does that have to do with someone typing 'http://example.com' with the intention that that is not turned into a link?

sanitycheck
0 replies
13h33m

I imagine example.com is either set up to be robust enough to withstand that, or they don't care if it goes down: https://www.iana.org/help/example-domains

Oh interesting, I pasted a URL in plain text and a bit of code in HN turned it into a link you can click on. I think it's totally fine for email clients to do that too.

The only thing I find redeeming about HTML email is the ability to have inline images so when I'm illustrating some sort of process to somebody I can do it more clearly. Without those, I'd create and send a proper document (I don't object to attachments), or publish the information on a wiki/blog/etc - but perhaps a those would be overall better approaches than a 'rich' email.

ktosobcy
3 replies
13h33m

1. all links are click-able at this point; what's more plain-text would force to provide just a link without all the tracking garbage 2. you can have paragraphs and headings... it's just a matter of structure - using html you can write a wall of text just fine 3. not sure if needed, besides you can attach images to plain text (though not inlining) or click-able links to external sources (at exact place) 4. still - easily do-able; it's a matter of particular editor tracking lists - for markdown editors it works just fine and in the end you virtually have a "plain text bullet list"... magic.

The most contagious/problematic issue is (3) and inlining - as I said, it's possible to attach anything but the location is lost. Probably something simple like anchor (again, markdown linking comes to mind) to indicate placement would be just fine...

(I loath html mails with passion…)

rakoo
1 replies
11h44m

what's more plain-text would force to provide just a link without all the tracking garbage

I'm glad that you never ever received any link to some derivation of st.es.rui.tracking/bzzz/pfrrrrt?campaign=hn that hide the real link, but in the real world, that's how tracking is done. Plain text doesn't prevent anything.

not sure if needed, besides you can attach images to plain text (though not inlining) or click-able links to external sources (at exact place)

For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

You want to argue that plain text is better, but your arguments are that plain tex, are better for you. Don't make the mistake to assume that your specific experience is a workable average.

pquki4
0 replies
10h5m

Don't make the mistake to assume that your specific experience is a workable average.

Sadly many people on HN do exactly this, as seen in comments like

"I don't use a phone and don't have a phone number, so I can't pass the anti-spam check of xx website. It is their fault"

"Why do we need a UI for this? Command line is much better than this"

"Why do we need to do this? I have been installing applications by compiling from source since 199x and it has worked perfectly fine for me."

lelanthran
0 replies
12h59m

1. all links are click-able at this point; what's more plain-text would force to provide just a link without all the tracking garbage 2. you can have paragraphs and headings... it's just a matter of structure - using html you can write a wall of text just fine 3. not sure if needed, besides you can attach images to plain text (though not inlining) or click-able links to external sources (at exact place) 4. still - easily do-able; it's a matter of particular editor tracking lists - for markdown editors it works just fine and in the end you virtually have a "plain text bullet list"... magic.

I think this comment displays the problems with plain text. I really couldn't have provided a better example.

As regards the counterpoints:

1. All links are clickable

Yes, and that's a bug. "http://www.example.com" should not be a clickable line. More to the point, it's not plain text anymore if the user gets something that has been interpreted and then rendered by the software.

2. It's not obvious how this should be done, and how it should reflow. You yourself failed to manage this in your reply, which I consider a good argument for why plain text is a poor UI.

3. Who cares whether you need it or not. The reality is that the clear majority of people use it!

4. Once again, if we're talking about a specific format that gets rendered into something readable, then it's not plain text anymore.

I'm arguing against the GPs assertion that plain text is the best format, not that markdown is insufficient.

makapuf
1 replies
14h34m

A subset of markdown (since you can use html in markdown) might be a good candidate.

prmoustache
0 replies
11h25m

I would have favored gemtext to avoid the temptation of re-adding html support to a dumbed down markdown flavor.

legitster
6 replies
18h6m

Plain text content is the best content.

Hard disagree. Things like bolding text, adding pictures, changing colors, etc are very important for the emails I send. So some amount of HTML is important to me.

arp242
1 replies
17h12m

Lack of ability to distinguish between pre-formatted text and regular prose alone makes it a complete non-starter for most who aren't reading monospaced text in a terminal. I don't really like reading monospace text for prose (many people don't), and using proportional fonts means things that are supposed to be aligned will break (and if you restrict yourself to text only, you'll find yourself aligning things on occasion for tables or other content).

I actually use plain text in FastMail because it's "better" than HTML (usually), but it's not good.

Ability to send text/markdown natively would be pretty brilliant.

brongondwana
0 replies
8h30m

Ctrl-D to format the selected text as monospace in the Fastmail composer is pretty nice - I use it often for sending bits of log line or terminal output when writing up incidents or describing how to do something.

HelmetFigNewton
1 replies
16h10m

RTF would be fine, then.

jeltz
0 replies
10h57m

Yes, it would be. It is a pity HTML won over RTF.

prmoustache
0 replies
11h27m

Gemtext[1] would have been perfect and way enough while still being legible on a terminal. Italic and bold can be done via unicode, you don't need a markup language for that.

[1] https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/gemtext.gmi

ktosobcy
0 replies
13h32m

plain-text with some sort of simple formatting would be fine (markdown/asciidoc). We don't have to go overboard in the opposite direction...

nox101
2 replies
15h19m

This reads me as "I prefer letters" or "I prefer fax"

HTML is what non-techies want, or rather, they want to insert pictures and videos directly inline. They want to bold and highlight. They want bullet lists and numbered lists. They want to change fonts, make headlines, etc.. And they want it all to reflow for their device.

I do to. I don't want to say in the 70s terminal. I get that lots of techies wish the world was still 80 column monochrome ASCII only but you're the exception.

nebulous1
0 replies
10h22m

I think the "techies" that you are referring to just see the issues with html email that the non-techies don't notice. Some of course just want things to be more like the 80-column monochrome that you mention, but for most it's not that extreme.

I think HTML is way too complicated for email, and it would have been much better if they'd standardised on a version of markdown.

That ship has sailed though, so we're stuck between using HTML or plain text.

medstrom
0 replies
13h50m

"80 column monochrome ASCII only"

Mmm... Paradise

nedt
2 replies
10h57m

Worst thing is spam. Second worst is silos by big players to fight spam, which makes it hard to run your own email server. Then comes HTML.

iamacyborg
1 replies
10h44m

Making it hard to run your own server seems to be a small price to pay to ensure billions of inboxes don’t get overly spammed.

nedt
0 replies
10h41m

It's not like many spammers are using SPF and DKIM. And then you have google sending bounce emails to spam although they already know with SPF that the original mail came from somewhere else making them the spammers.

jordanreger
2 replies
18h29m

Pretty much the only credit I'll give to Amazon is that they give the option to get plaintext emails. Doesn't mask the larger problems, but still a nice thing I wish was the norm.

HelmetFigNewton
1 replies
16h9m

Amazon deserves zero credit for anything regarding E-mail, because their "order confirmations" don't say WHAT YOU ORDERED.

Mind-bogglingly stupid and annoying.

derrikcurran
0 replies
15h53m

I think that's because they don't want email providers, Gmail in particular, scraping for purchase history

mavhc
0 replies
11h33m

Surely lack of soft wrapping in the first version was the worst thing to happen to email, that breaks quoting, which leads to top posting.

Also lack of a signature section, relying on weird -- \n hacks

cortesoft
0 replies
16h37m

I like being able to email in line photos

Dylan16807
0 replies
16h30m

Weird limited HTML isn't fun, but images, basic layout, and some amount of font control are all pretty important features.

userbinator
19 replies
21h38m

The lower the score, the better. I know many who have a policy of "emails must be in plaintext only, with no attachments unless agreed to in advance; everything else gets deleted automatically."

shortformblog
16 replies
21h7m

Expand your group of people, because you clearly don’t know enough people.

evantbyrne
9 replies
20h32m

They said many of the people they know only accept plaintext, not all of them. We should interpret each other generously.

shortformblog
6 replies
20h23m

My point, though, is about confirmation bias. Most people don’t know a lot of people who turn on plaintext email as a point of habit.

It might seem like I’m criticizing the guy, but the thing is, there is a very real problem where people are looking at this from their own tech-forward perspective when this is a topic that affects many more people.

pyrale
4 replies
8h55m

I believe there are two points in the message :

- A normative one : the less is supported, the better.

- A descriptive one : many (not indicative of any share) of their relations actually do that.

None of the points is telling about their relations, aside from, maybe, not having many friends in adtech.

shortformblog
3 replies
8h12m

"Many friends in adtech ..." try average people.

HTML email would not be a thing if only adtech people used it, my man.

pyrale
2 replies
7h14m

Average people tend to use what they have, I have zero "average" friend trying to get more supported features than there currently are.

And, by the way, most of my friends do not use html/CSS directly, or even indirectly use it besides some bold, coloring or the random photo attachment. Zero of them know caniemail.com, and, if they understood the point of it, zero of them would want or need it.

Average people seeing html in their mail doesn't mean they have an opinion on it, or would want more of it if they were told honestly what it does and who abuses it.

shortformblog
1 replies
6h18m

This was not my point and you know it.

There are two parts to how HTML email is used: Creation and consumption. The average person consumes HTML email.

pyrale
0 replies
5h36m

This was not my point and you know it.

No, but that was mine in the message you answered to.

The average person consumes HTML email.

And I'm not sure the average person cares about receiving elaborate emails with spy pixels and advanced use of CSS either.

userbinator
0 replies
20h7m

For another interesting datapoint: Of the plaintext-only and plaintext-strongly-preferred people I know, somehow almost all of them are German. I wouldn't call them "tech-forward" either, as many of them are specialists in other fields.

...and before the inevitable questioning I'm going to receive: no, I'm not German, and I know more people who aren't, with similar plaintext preferences.

lelanthran
0 replies
14h27m

They said many of the people they know only accept plaintext, not all of them.

And parent said "you don't know enough people", not "you don't know any people".

darkstar_16
0 replies
16h4m

generously and with a little more respect.

dylan604
5 replies
21h3m

I disagree. I wish I had more people that fit that filter. Email is broken and just a platform for spam. Even if it might be from someone that I purchased something from once or even regularly, if I did not select a check box to opt-in to receiving your email, it is spam.

It's 2024. Emailing large file attachments is about as old and busted as FTP. There are so many other services to "share" large files. Attachment to email was such a kludgy hack in the first place just shows it was only the best worst idea waiting for better solutions. We have them now.

shortformblog
4 replies
21h0m

As someone who works very regularly in email, it really bugs me that every time I see a thread about this topic in Hacker News there seems to be this confirmation bias that this is how the average person uses email in the wild, and I’m just trying to make the point that “Hey, this is a strong minority viewpoint.”

I get that y’all don’t like HTML email, but the fact of the matter is, that was a battle lost 25 years ago, and we need to figure out how to keep what we have working for people who don’t even know how to set plaintext email.

That’s what this particular tool is for.

shortformblog
2 replies
20h36m

By this standard, we should go back to Lynx, because rich web browsers are way more dangerous than this extreme edge case that this guy invented because he doesn’t like HTML email.

croes
1 replies
16h41m

Guess why browser sandboxes, TLS and HTTPS exist?

But the mail protocol is still the same.

shortformblog
0 replies
7h52m

That's a problem of failing to manage standards, not a problem with rich text in emails.

Email is a standards backwater, but the solution is not to kneecap it.

yyyk
0 replies
5h54m

There's a good case for expanding slightly on plaintext. It's not just decorative - some usecases like Right-to-Left or lists or linked are helped by a little markup, and HTML is good enough.

The problem is going overboard on CSS (maybe none should be allowed) or allowing any javascript at all. I can't recall any email security issue ever which is HTML only without any CSS or javascript.

jimbobthrowawy
0 replies
2h3m

I know at least two people who send emails where the HTML version is either blank or tells the recipient to stop using a bloated client, and the actual email content is in the plaintext fallback. I think I had to look at the email source in thunderbird to read them.

ryanbigg
16 replies
19h51m

What an excellent resource! (And yes Outlook is a pain and supports so very little!)

We've tried building email templates for notifications for our apps where I work, and it has typically been a pain. We have since swapped to using mjml (https://mjml.io/) to build the templates, and it's working wonders. The output seems the be the most compatible with all different devices that we've tested on.

The other tool we enjoy using is Litmus (https://litmus.com), which allows you to throw in an email template and see what it looks like on all kinds of apps and devices. Other thread here mentions https://testi.at/ as well, which we've also had success with.

All of these have been really invaluable to designing emails for our apps.

shortformblog
5 replies
19h42m

MJML is easily the best tool of its kind and I use it a lot. If anyone is trying to build emails in 2024, it's a major shortcut that helps avoid and mitigate some of HTML email’s biggest headaches.

iamacyborg
4 replies
10h46m

It can quite quickly lead to clipping in gmail if you’re not careful though.

willdr
2 replies
10h33m

can you elaborate?

joe8756438
0 replies
9h27m

the mjml components unpack to a very large number of html tags. so depending on how you structure the doc it can exceed the gmail doc size with a surprisingly small amount of content

iamacyborg
0 replies
9h5m

Gmail will clip emails if they’re larger than (I think) 104kb.

Using frameworks like mjml can add a lot of arbitrary markup that’ll rapidly increase the size of your email.

shortformblog
0 replies
8h14m

I usually add a minify step to my sends for this reason.

In my experience one of the biggest causes of clipping is styled links with lots of tracking, oddly enough.

rjzzleep
4 replies
12h25m

What an excellent resource! (And yes Outlook is a pain and supports so very little!)

So outlook today is the internet explorer of mail?

easton
2 replies
12h17m

It literally is, Outlook for Windows uses the IE9 engine to render HTML email, IIRC. And even then not everything is supported.

Vinnl
0 replies
10h16m

Which is an improvement over when it used to use the Word engine to render HTML email, IIRC.

GoblinSlayer
0 replies
11h56m

You aren't trying to send an angular SPA in an email, are you?

another_kel
0 replies
11h50m

Kind of. Though if outlook magically goes away we'll still make emails with <table> because most clients still do not support even flex-direction. Outlook is just exceptionally bad with stuff like width:100px working on table elements, but not on <div>, or padding working only on specific elements.

dabber
2 replies
16h32m

mjml looks really interesting, thanks for sharing. I wish there was a business reason for orgs to care about accessable and machine readable (I guess OCR is a thing now but still) emails.

I've been using Foundation for Emails[1] for the very small number of emails that I've worked on which required more than just a list of img tags, and I really appreciate it for existing because HTML emails have been stuck in ie6 web days.

[1]: https://get.foundation/emails.html

varnaud
0 replies
12h51m

I assume most email client support email with both html and txt content. If they don't support html or configured not to display it, the txt version is displayed.

We have a html and txt template for each email we send. It's not exactly double the work, but it's appreciated by some of our customers.

darekkay
0 replies
15h0m

I wish there was a business reason for orgs to care about accessable and machine readable emails.

I hope the upcoming EU Accessibility Act will be enough for many organizations to finally make their emails accessible. I disable images by default in my email client, and some emails are pretty much empty without them, without providing any alternative.

chrisldgk
0 replies
11h14m

While we‘re here I‘d also like to recommend react-email[1] which I‘ve been using for building emails for a while now. The components it offers are more than enough and it‘s definitely better than building mails with <!—MSO—> tags every five lines like we did back in my email marketing days.

[1] https://react.email

almost
0 replies
13h59m

Thank you so much for linking testi.at. I’ve been looking for an affordable alternative to Litmus!

Eric_WVGG
15 replies
20h38m

HTML email was such a tragic mistake.

I think the whole mess could have been averted if Markdown had been invented about twenty years earlier.

zzzkkk
11 replies
20h30m

Is this intended as sarcasm? Markdown renders to html, it's an authoring syntax that happens to be readable in it's "code" state. How would it solve email?

The real issue is bespoke rendering engines instead of just using a rule of "everything the current browser can do, but no js".

arp242
6 replies
17h4m

Markdown gives most people >95% of the formatting they want to do.

It's easy and fairly intuitive to write (most of it, anyway).

It's easy to read in different formats and ways (HTML, plain text).

It doesn't add highly complex rendering issues. I've worked on two email clients in the last ten years, and the amount of weird HTML some send is just bonkers. Is <div style="position:fixed"> in emails crazy? Yes. Do you need to deal with it? Also yes.

prmoustache
5 replies
11h20m

The point is: markdown is HTML, not something else.

arp242
2 replies
10h59m

It's not. Markdown is markdown. It can render to HTML, but that's a different thing. I struggle to understand why this is even a point of contention.

prmoustache
1 replies
10h38m

Since it supports any HTML tag, it is irrelevant.

Mandate markdown and MTAs and marketing departments will send you markdown only made of pure HTML.

arp242
0 replies
10h18m

That's quite the pivot from "markdown is HTML". But no, it probably shouldn't support HTML tags, or support it with limits. And maybe also a few other things like #-headers also shouldn't be supported as it can be too easily to do by accident. All of that seems pretty obvious in all but the most aggressively pedantic reading.

jeltz
1 replies
10h55m

Is C amd64 assembly then?

prmoustache
0 replies
10h35m

If your C code end up like that, yes:

``` #include <stdio.h>

int main() { /* my software in ASM */ __asm__ ( [...<insert your assembly code lines here>...] );

    return 0 ;
} ```

And you are pretty sure this is pretty much what would happen with markdown in emails if it ended up being mandatory. You would end up with emails entirely made of html.

pavo-etc
1 replies
19h18m

If emails could be marked up with the subset of HTML that Markdown is able to generate without having inlined HTML tags, email markup would be so pleasant. Just bold/italics, some headings, tables, properly flowing text, code blocks, horizontal rule, links, and images.

prmoustache
0 replies
11h16m

you just need gemtext. Bold/Italics can be done with unicode, no need for a markup language.

Images can just be links and it would be a setting on the client to open it or not. Like what the Lagrange gemini browser does: it lets you click on a link to an image to load it.

I would argue that even tables are superfluous, you could put a csv file in a block quote and people's clients could just render it optionnally.

shortformblog
0 replies
20h27m

Yes, this. Many more would be fine with HTML email if it didn’t work like IE6—and honestly, the only reason it does is because of decades-old enshittification that we failed to address at the time.

Eric_WVGG
0 replies
17h32m

Not in the slightest.

You can’t make elaborate layouts with Markdown. You can’t obfuscate text in images or make hidden links or inject JavaScript.

Just some basic text styling (headers, italics, bold type), and images. Everything necessary to make a well-formatted message — which is what email is supposed to be — instead of mailing a web page, in a medium that hasn’t been refined for quality and safety like modern HTML+CSS has.

langsoul-com
0 replies
8h1m

Non proper and standard HTML email was and still is a mistake.

You're really rolling a dice on what may work, even if it's valid HTML

HelmetFigNewton
0 replies
16h5m

RTF was invented in 1987.

whoisthemachine
14 replies
21h54m

The two most popular clients, Gmail and Outlook, are ranked at 25 and 41 (the bottom) respectively.

jolmg
12 replies
21h47m

That's reminiscent of IE, being the most popular and underfeatured.

dylan604
11 replies
21h1m

Most popular only because it was included with the OS and most IT departments did not allow use of other browsers. Just because it was the most installed does not make it the most popular. There was an old saying, "Internet Explorer: the most used browser to download another browser."

wongarsu
3 replies
20h40m

IE 4 and 5 were pretty good. ActiveDesktop was pretty cool. XMLHttpRequest turned out to be revolutionary.

It was only after triple whammy of Netscape being unable to further compete, the dotcom crash and the antitrust suit against Microsoft's integration between Windows and IE that IE got deprioritized by MS and slowly turned into the underfeatured mess every developer hated.

dylan604
1 replies
19h18m

IE for Mac was atrocious. Woz has some interesting thoughts about it in his book iWoz.

kalleboo
0 replies
16h27m

Although Netscape was even worse (if you resized the window, it reloaded the whole page), and IE for Mac at the time had the best CSS support out of any browser (it was a different renderer from IE Win). I did a lot of bouncing between browsers (Netscape/IE/iCab/Opera) back then until Mozilla came out and wiped everything else out.

darkwater
0 replies
7h58m

This take is pretty revisionist. IE4 wasn't good, ActiveDesktop and ActiveX were either useless or actually bad. AJAX was probably the only good thing out of IE, and I would not dare to call it an happy accident but I'm tempted

lolinder
2 replies
20h44m

That was a saying later in the game and among techies. Website usage stats indicate that in 2007 a solid 67% of people were using IE, and that didn't drop below a majority of usage until mid-2010.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

dylan604
1 replies
19h14m

I remember hearing stats about the continued high numbers for IE, but a lot of those numbers were attributed to pirated copies of XP being used in China. Maybe it was why IE6 seemed to hang around as high as it was. Just a clarification of the numbers that I found interesting.

jolmg
2 replies
19h10m

Just because it was the most installed does not make it the most popular.

It kind of does:

popular - prevailing among the people generally --- https://www.dictionary.com/browse/popular

I didn't mean to say most preferred.

dylan604
1 replies
18h55m

It's not a like it's a vote. Most people didn't choose it. They had it because their corp uses Windows, and Windows came with IE, and IT did not allow other browsers.

jolmg
0 replies
3h51m

I'm saying I agree with you. It's just that we're using different definitions of "popular".

gertop
0 replies
19h15m

You're being a revisionist. The claim that it wasn't popular is just dumb. For years it was simply superior to all other browsers (both technologically and users liking it).

tgv
0 replies
13h58m

When I look at the features gmail doesn't support, I see things like "display: none", animation, and other kinds of css which arguably shouldn't be part of an email. The basics are there, so that makes high ranking not necessarily a good target.

HelmetFigNewton
8 replies
16h11m

"like caniuse"

Is that supposed to tell us something?

issafram
2 replies
16h9m

Yes. It is used to let us know which HTML elements/features/etc are supported by different browsers/versions

HelmetFigNewton
1 replies
16h6m

It doesn't say that. It merely says this thing is like another undescribed thing.

At first I thought it was some kind of service for dog owners, until I noticed the missing N. So... that left no explanation.

jeltz
0 replies
10h51m

An undescribed but very famous thing among the readers of HN.

Longhanks
1 replies
14h36m

If you had typed half your comment into a search machine instead of the HN comment box, you would've gotten an answer.

guenthert
0 replies
13h0m

But then I would have had to search as well.

As a rule of thumb (well, wishful thinking, I realize), if Wikipedia doesn't know it, spend a few words to introduce a term.

tuyiown
0 replies
13h27m

caniuse is an extremely popular website among people that had to touch web technologies, so much that almost anyone searching for issues on web apis seriously will have hard time not stumble upon it very quickly.

Hence, it's a totally valid assomption that the HN crowd might be aware of it. I'm sorry you were not, but you really are an outlier on this, which is really not a bad thing, btw.

debesyla
0 replies
16h8m

https://caniuse.com/ is a popular tool to check what web features are working across different browsers - "can you use this and assume that it will work for others".

ahofmann
0 replies
16h5m

caniuse.com is a website, where developers can check which features are supported by which browser and their versions. It is a immensely useful resource for webdevs.

decremental
6 replies
21h50m

I wish there was something like BrowserStack but you send a test email and it shows you how it renders on tons of different email clients on various platforms. It wouldn't work for web-based email like Gmail but it would still be useful.

rsoto
1 replies
20h25m

Best tool I've found is Testi@[1]. It's really affordable and it supports basically everything out there.

* Disclaimer: Not affiliated, just a happy customer.

- [1] https://testi.at/

shortformblog
0 replies
19h46m

This looks cool, thank you for sharing!

benmanns
1 replies
21h39m

Good news, https://www.litmus.com/ is exactly this, and does work for Gmail.

rrrx3
0 replies
25m

Litmus, testi@, Email on Acid, InboxMonster, SendForensics, Email Preview Services…

Most if not all also support stuff like deliverability, DMARC testing, Analytics, Accessibility, as well as web-based render testing. I think rendering engine wise, Testi@ has the largest device/platform coverage. Or at least last I checked.

iamacyborg
0 replies
10h47m

There are quite a few tools that literally do exactly what you’re asking for.

FigurativeVoid
6 replies
21h38m

I was using this for a feature I was working on last week.

That’s when I learned gmail doesn’t support SVG???? That seems like a huge miss.

peddling-brink
5 replies
21h21m

SVG supports JavaScript.

cypherpunks01
3 replies
20h41m

Huh, I didn't really fully understand that about SVG. Thanks for the info.

From what I'm reading, it seems that from inside an SVG script, you can call out to javascript functions of the parent page? That seems kinda surprising, I'm sure there are security policies around it, but it means that there are potential security and performance risks/considerations around hosting and serving SVG files that I didn't realize existed.

barkbyte
2 replies
20h31m

The comment you’re replying to is misleading. SVG supports JavaScript but only if you load the SVG directly in your browser or inline it fully into the DOM. Using it as a normal image tag, by reference or with inlined data:, it’s inert and harmless from a JavaScript perspective.

However, for a long time browsers were susceptible to denial of service attacks from maliciously crafted XML files, which SVG could exploit. (“Million laughs”). This doesn’t work in current versions but it might be a reason that SVGs are rejected.

cypherpunks01
0 replies
19h43m

Ahh ok thanks for the clarification, that makes sense

arp242
0 replies
16h56m

Rendering HTML emails in the browser is rather tricky business, because HTML/CSS isolation mechanisms are non-existent or come with a lot of caveats. You want to make sure your layout doesn't get screwed because of some bonkers HTML/CSS but you also don't want the intended layout of the email to be completely screwed.

It's been a long while since I worked on this, but I was always very hesitant to make changes here, because we knew that our current thing worked for almost all customers, and you never knew what changes would break what.

We dogfooded our own client, and at some point a change I made broke the automated SIDN (which manages .nl TLD) emails. I forgot what exactly it was, but they did some really weird stuff. You can't just shrug and say "oh well, that's just crazy, fix your emails" because people do need those emails and getting these types of organisations to take action is like moving a mountain.

arjvik
0 replies
21h9m

can't Gmail support SVG without javascript?

morgunkorn
5 replies
16h14m

Hilarious anecdote about this website: the owner once said there are tons of entries in the usage log of people misunderstanding the purpose of the website and inputting celebrities names to try to email them. :D

kome
1 replies
12h51m

that's a startup idea. and the answer to the "can i email...?" will be always a static page the says "no".

there is money to be made here.

loa_in_
0 replies
11h53m

That's not true and a very much defeatist view. Yes, you can talk with people if they're willing to listen and maybe even respond. Yes, even if they're extremely popular already. Even if they're richer than you.

junon
1 replies
15h33m

I wish there was a database of some sort for these sorts of anecdotes!

seper8
0 replies
14h14m

canianecdote

mamediz
0 replies
9h13m

At first glance I was trying to figure out what this is about but, so far nothing. It's "like caniuse but for email content", ok but, what is caniuse? I don't know if it is worth but, before launching something new, I wish everyone consider to publish a brief section to explain to the average person what this is about.

idle_zealot
4 replies
15h46m

A fully-featured HTML "document" is really an application, not a document at all, so it makes sense that mail clients limit support. But this fragmentation makes me yearn for a real standard here, an official non-application subset of HTML that doesn't allow fetching remote resources or executing code. Just a document format with embedded media, animations, styling, etc.

social_quotient
2 replies
13h37m

Is it a “document” if it has animations and non static (video) media?

joquarky
0 replies
2h43m

PDF documents support video.

idle_zealot
0 replies
13h22m

Arguably? We don't really have a standard format like that in common usage so I can't predict where people would settle on it linguistically.

pyrale
0 replies
9h3m

Quite honestly, people have no business sending me code to execute or resources to fetch.

I get that adtech is interested in using my email as their billboard, but they can fuck right off. Plaintext + attachments or gtfo.

jpecar
3 replies
11h50m

Soooooo happy that my mail client is not even on the list here. It automatically strips out anything remotely looking like html and it sends out plain text emails only, as email was designed to be and should still be.

Anyone sending me css garbage will be directed to /dev/null. Thanks.

mike31fr
1 replies
11h37m

Reminds me of someone I knew 15 years ago, who often said "Anyone sending me text messages with abbreviations doesn't deserve a response". Sadly, now this guy has hardly any friends.

tormeh
0 replies
10h20m

Text messages with abbreviations come from real people. Emails with HTML and CSS are almost all automated, and usually some kind of spam.

(Some email clients for humans probably add a bit of html and css to everything, but you get what I mean. It still looks like plain text)

pembrook
0 replies
9h18m

Have you ever come across the insanely rare use case of wanting to put something in italic or bold?

Or even more insane, maybe wanting to add a link in an email?

Or, you ever purchase anything online? It’s kind of nice to have line items in receipts and an image of the thing I bought. But then again, I’m an irrational human who enjoys things like “aesthetic readability.”

As a true purist, do you also exclusively program in Machine code? Because that’s how all software was originally designed to be.

Seems silly to get religious about it.

eqvinox
3 replies
21h24m

Isn't AMP considered an antifeature these days? Last I heard even Google had abandoned it — but this is outside my zone of expertise, so I might be wrong?

dubcanada
1 replies
21h18m

It’s still quite wildly on websites. But it doesn’t even have support for GA4 yet. It’s probably dead just not yet on the dead list.

dylan604
0 replies
21h0m

You maybe underestimating the number of people that use things without knowing what said things do, so those things just continue to live and never get migrated away from use.

shortformblog
0 replies
20h49m

AMP for email is a bit different of a beast. It works a lot differently from the web version and is used essentially to add interactivity to the email. If you use Google Docs, it’s what allows you to directly reply to a comment in your inbox.

EduardoBautista
2 replies
11h9m

How would this be privacy leaking? Wouldn't only the email viewer be able to see the result of using :visited?

nedt
1 replies
10h59m

You could just load a different (invisible) background image based on the visited state to send out a ping.

pabs3
2 replies
10h31m

Hmm, no mention of JavaScript or remote resources, nor any of the Linux clients.

asddubs
1 replies
10h29m

do any email clients support js?

silon42
0 replies
10h23m

I hope not.

kivlad
2 replies
21h31m

The new Outlook desktop client is awful, but there's one silver lining and it's the retirement of the even more awful Word HTML renderer.

croes
0 replies
21h28m

MS did it on purpose for security reasons

chrismorgan
0 replies
20h32m

Are you sure? I have a vague recollection of someone confirming late last year that it was still MSO. But I may be mistaken.

dustedcodes
2 replies
11h5m

I can't figure out how to use it.

When I enter "<a href="https://example.org>Test</a>" it says "No results found. Why not suggest this feature to be added?".

When I enter "<a>" I get "AMP for email", "BIMI", "accent-color" and lots of other CSS attributes starting with "a" as result.

When I enter "a" I get the same as above.

How do I check if I can email the HTML Anchor tag? The input says "HTML, CSS, ..." but it doesn't seem to understand HTML unless I'm doing it wrong?

nedt
1 replies
11h1m

You might have been unlucky searching for the a element that's really short. And very basic HTML would work everywhere. But you might be more happy to go via the feature list: https://www.caniemail.com/features/

dustedcodes
0 replies
10h1m

LOL ok that was just a really unfortunate coincidence. I used the <a> tag because I knew it would/should be supported everywhere so wanted to test the website with an input where I know what response to expect :)

ceejayoz
2 replies
21h27m

I thought this'd be one of those novelty sites that just say "No." in a big font.

beAbU
0 replies
13h1m

That's usually my default answer when my design team comes to me with a request for email template updates. "No. Basic formatting only. If you are feeling frisky, tables. Nothing more"

NoGravitas
0 replies
9h16m

Really should have been.

qwerty456127
1 replies
18h37m

What about RoundCube, RainLoop, SquirrelMail etc?

Aachen
0 replies
8h44m

I was also a bit disappointed by the lack of open source coverage. If someone uses proprietary crap that doesn't work, they can go cry to their vendor, but I'd like Thunderbird, K9, FairEmail, and RoundCube to work for example. Anyone is free to use these so it would be cool if emails work there

Would you be interested in adding RoundCube, FairEmail, and K9 support? Those clients I'm familiar with so I can easily load up some eml files into my IMAP server and try them out, but it's some 144 tests total and a tad much to do all alone for "fun"

l0b0
1 replies
20h23m

Is there something like this for features techies might care about? Like some sort of guarantee of at-rest encryption, SMTP/IMAP/POP/etc support, end user encryption, reasonably fast search, backup/restore, etc.

GNOME Evolution and Thunderbird, at least last I used it, have abysmal search speed, taking seconds to search through a local DB of a few thousand emails. So they're clearly using search tech much inferior to a local DB with indexes.

fastball
0 replies
19h52m

I don't know about most of your list, but I do know that Proton Mail has E2EE email encryption via their proprietary client.

isodev
1 replies
16h32m

I love it! Designing emails is always a bit of a pain. With that said… plain text emails are so sexy ;).

dankobgd
0 replies
10h22m

but no, we can't just write plain text, we have to put our whole website inside an email

zipping1549
0 replies
18h59m

Bost mased HTML tag

Julesman
1 replies
21h42m

I think it would be more useful to list the few CSS properties that all email clients do recognize. I don't mean to be flippant. I'm serious.

CanIEmail? The answer is generally no.

SigmundurM
0 replies
12h49m

If you go to this page: https://www.caniemail.com/clients/

and select "check all", it'll show you the features that are supported by all the email clients, and separately, which features have mixed support.

These appear to be the few features supported by all clients:

- border-collapse

- font shorthand

- list-style-type

- cm unit

- em unit

- ex unit

- in unit

- mm unit

- pc unit

- % unit

- pt unit

- px unit

- vertical-align

- <del> element

- <div> element

- <h1> to <h6> elements

- <hr> element

- <img> element

- <p> element

- <pre> element

- <span> element

- <strong> element

- <table> element

- valign attribute

- JPG image format

- PNG image format

Doctor_Fegg
1 replies
14h25m

Apple Mail (iOS) : 266/284

Gmail (Android) : 111/284

Interesting corrective to the “Apple is holding back HTML” narrative that appears so often on HN.

darylteo
0 replies
7h33m

Honestly the biggest surprise to me. How on EARTH is Apple Mail (OSX) top!

throw4847285
0 replies
8h7m

I can't be the only person disappointed that this isn't Caninemail.com, can I?

sachahjkl
0 replies
12h42m

Tuta.com not here :(

mykehunt
0 replies
14h37m

MJML is better than most but remember every templating language has a footprint.

When possible reduce your html code weight to the bare bones minimum. Nothing too fancy. Keep it logical. After a bit of practice it’s actually easy and in my opinion often faster than MJML (For example MailJet. Don’t even get me started on Klaviyo.)

Even with minimal coding/hmtl experience you can run your code through GPT-4/Bard.

Bonus for including custom instructions such as “transactional intent”, Bayesian/heuristic filtering, coded for users with poor digital accessibility, under-served internet users, etc.

Even with the best domain domain/ip reputation without a positive engagement history specific to that user you will often land in promotions/other tab and not the primary tab for new users with a heavily weighted creative.

Remember you want to mimic “an email from Grandma” while maintaining some degree of control of visual design.

Or if that’s too complicated just keep your subject line under three words and all lowercase.

kylehotchkiss
0 replies
21h39m

Outlook supporting padding in 2003 then not really supporting it in any follow up client sounds just about right for the dumpster fire experience that is trying to make an email look nice.

kwhitefoot
0 replies
12h11m

No Thunderbird on Linux, Windows, etc.? Is it different on MacOS?

ktosobcy
0 replies
13h28m

I would love for a middle-ground to emerge - plain-text emails with rudimentary formatting and ability to inline images. Something like markdown/asciidoc would be fine for overwhelming majority of cases. Unfortunately we ended up in a world where HTML email is a commonplace…

kcrwfrd_
0 replies
15h1m

Dark mode support in email is one of the most frustrating things I’ve dealt with as a frontend dev who’s been coding since the IE6 days.

Basically you have to accept that you must only implement a light mode design and choose colors that will look okay when automatically inverted by all of the shoddy dark mode email client implementations.

Gmail is one of the worst offenders. You have zero recourse for picking your own colors for dark mode.

gtirloni
0 replies
10h8m

The compare email clients option got me confused. I select Thunderbird and Apple Mail and didn't get a list of differences.

emmet
0 replies
14h41m

Flashbacks to making a nice email template for a company only to find out their entire client list used outlook from a decade earlier and could just about render plaintext. There was no point in me even showing up.

chrisfrantz
0 replies
21h19m

I use this daily, great resource.

andrew_
0 replies
19h55m

FWIW jsx-email has a builtin CLI email client compatibility check which uses the caniemail dataset: https://jsx.email/docs/core/cli#check

EyebrowsWhite
0 replies
13h4m

I use plain text, and I even enable "block external image" on the client, and I would advise others to do the same, because there is just too much phishing with email..

Animats
0 replies
19h20m

It's about content, not deliverability. It looks like it's intended to test whether A can email B, which would be useful. But no.