Better emails are in plain text

It’s both amusing and disheartening to read an article from 2016 that addresses the problems in a widely used technology and offers better alternatives to prevalent yet highly annoying practices, only to realize that nothing has changed in the past seven years. At least things haven’t deteriorated any further! Or did they?

In his article “Please use text/plain for email” Drew Devault argues that The biggest problem with email is the widespread use of HTML email.

• HTML emails often contain tracking images. Though many modern email clients have learned to tackle this problem. But not all of them have.
• HTML rendering engines in email clients are a common source of security vulnerabilities.
• HTML makes phishing easier by making it trivial to hide the actual URL of the link.
• HTML emails break natural inline quoting that was the cornerstone of email and newsgroup communications for half a century.

Drew even put up a neat website: “Use plain text email” complete with the software recommendations, How-To’s for almost all modern email clients (including the web-based ones), and even the etiquette tips for those of us who forgot or never learned them.