> unfortunately HTML email is the way of the world
Is it really? I still use mutt, and I have found 99% of the time, heavy HTML in e-mail means the mail is spam.
Occasionally an important e-mail (bank, etc) might contain a few HTML links, easy enough to visually parse. Real individual people IME send plain text, even non-techies.
Have you been using it in an enterprise scenario? Essentially the main email clients people use, Outlook etc, all default to HTML emails these days. Plus there is a big love of embedded images in signatures, different fonts around the text in their signatures.. all sorts of stuff. Roughly 90% of the direct email I receive in my inbox comes through in HTML form.
Plain text is more often coming from mailing lists and automated systems that email me.
> Plus there is a big love of embedded images in signatures, different fonts around the text in their signatures.. all sorts of stuff.
IMO not displaying people's dumb signatures is a big advantage of text email clients. I switched to mu4e with w3m this year after about a decade of gmail use, and get and reply to a lot of HTML emails. I used the plain-text toggle in gmail all the time, and now w3m automatically does it for me. Never going back to webmail.
> Have you been using it in an enterprise scenario?
Yeah, sort of, an academic/hospital setting. Actually, I combined my academic and personal e-mail addresses into one at a custom domain, and forward other accounts to it, which annoys some colleagues.
Most people here use Outlook. Sometimes people might have a mailto: link in sig (which gives me a chuckle as it's pointless), but I don't ever remember encountering embedded images.
The biggest human offenders for sending HTML-heavy e-mails are university-wide announcements. In my mind, these fall closer to spam than ham, and what useful information is in them can usually be gained from the title.
> Roughly 90% of the direct email I receive in my inbox comes through in HTML form.
Same, because I haven't bothered to set up spam filtering. But of the e-mails I actually want to read, well below 5% do.
> Plain text is more often coming from mailing lists and automated systems that email me.
Fascinating. For me it is just the opposite. People don't usually seem to bother using HTML, consciously at least. But automated systems use it quite liberally.
> The biggest human offenders for sending HTML-heavy e-mails are university-wide announcements. In my mind, these fall closer to spam than ham, and what useful information is in them can usually be gained from the title.
If only! My alma mater always uses the subject "Important message from <University>". It never is.
Is it really? I still use mutt, and I have found 99% of the time, heavy HTML in e-mail means the mail is spam.
Occasionally an important e-mail (bank, etc) might contain a few HTML links, easy enough to visually parse. Real individual people IME send plain text, even non-techies.