My pet peeve are services that go out of their way to include a text/plain alternative message part but send something useless, such as the message without the key link. One time I seriously ran into a service just send a short one-sentence note along the lines of "this is a plain text email" as the plain text part. If you don't want to support plain text, maybe just don't send the alternative part?
This might be me being old, but I still don't understand why html emails aren't the exception. If you want to do a fancy newsletter, trying to sell me crap, I can see why you'd need the images, the css and html. In most other cases, I don't really get the point.
I find the ones that try to be cute the most frustrating because these appear on the new message notifications so I can't just delete them straight from the notification.
We'd love to share this exciting announcement but you'll a different email app.
Although I guess the argument will be that email clients should use AI to summarise the HTML into a plain text summary.
> Although I guess the argument will be that email clients should use AI to summarise the HTML into a plain text summary.
Or you could pass it through ~5,000 lines of C [1] and you will have it done in milliseconds even on hardware that would be old enough to drink.
[1]: https://codemadness.org/webdump.html
I had one who sent me the booking details of another client in the plaintext part. I reported it to them nearly a year ago and they didn't reply, so screw anonymity, it was Avis.
If you're in EU or California, you should probably email the local data privacy official's offices about that.
Then report it to your government authority in charge of GDPR Enforcement. They suddenly will care very much about it
So I'm wondering a bit here - I've seen an implementation where emails to send only have html versions, but as part of the sending process the html is run through a Lynx browser process with the -dump command to get the plain text, which is included as the text/plain part of the email.
Is there actual value to this? e.g. Is the output of Lynx's text dump better for plain-text email clients than whatever they'd display for html emails?
I've personally converted html to plaintext with beautifulsoup in python, and used that as the plaintext version. Did not have complaints, but I honestly don't know who actually reads the non-html version.
Some (old?) spam filters may be triggered by html only emails.
the best is when some put the same payload in the text/plain part as in the text/html part. yes. the html source. as text/plain.
My favorite is when the plain text version is a bunch of css and html.