Plain Text Email

Gentle Readers,

TWC gets a lot of email, most of which is HTML. However, I still get several emails a day in plain text. Often they've been forwarded a few times and as a rule, the text is splattered across the page, the pictures are stripped out, the formatting has gone dyslexic, and whatever meaning or beauty the page held is gone.

Hot tip: Most people are not going to individually open sixteen formerly-embedded pictures and try to fit them with the now-unformatted text that makes no sense. It's mind numbing to do so and the delete key looms large.

Worse. Try tracking a conversation back and forth in plain text with all those > > >. After two or three replies you've lost the rabbit. I'll try to keep up if it's a friend or a client, but I'm grumbling the entire time. Eventually, plain text requires that you excise the relevant parts and paste them into a new email just to beat back the urge to inhale fumes from the tailpipe of an idling UPS truck and slip gently into that good night.

In the heyday of plain text, emails were terse and direct, with little flourish or flair. Plain text was all there was and, like a loin cloth, it served it's purpose. In modern America, we are half past 2008 and plain text email is a relic, a dinosaur, the Neanderthal of the modern computer world.

As Always,

TWC

Comments

AMEN!

[Jennifer]

Werd to your mutha!

[Your Slum Lord]

I hate plain text. Why do Mac users invariably use plain text?

[David Riach]

Your daily missive arrives in plain text ... or am I missing something?

Life is too short to be tarting up a simple message where plain text will suffice.

[TWC]

Hi David, thanks for your comment and your subscription to TWC. We appreciate your patronage.

If you receive the email version of TWC, it is certainly simplified. However, more than likely it arrives in html with the embedded pictures intact. The simplification gives the appearance of plain text but it is probably html unless you have a setting in your email software that converts every incoming email to plain text, which some people do.

In addition, it will not contain embedded videos, as those are usually stripped out (sometimes by MS security settings), which is why I always include a link to the videos specifically for email subscribers.

If you are using a feed reader, what you see may vary. Some have a pretty bland interface that resembles plain text. Others are a little more spiffy.

True plain text email looks like it was typed on a 1950 manual Underwood typewriter and when one responds to it the original text looks much like this:

>The state legislature finally enacted a nondiscretionary carry permit
>law in 2004. Since then anyone 21 or older with a clean record who
>passes a safety course has been eligible for a permit. A recent story
>in The Columbus Dispatch
> >s.ART_ART_03-30-08_A1_QQ9PC2U.html?sid=101>notes
>a fact that was widely overlooked during the debate over concealed

Plain text email does not contain embedded links or pictures. You cannot change font color or the font itself. It becomes problematic when a conversation goes back and forth and each reply contains more of these <<<<<<.

The other gripe is when html emails were converted to plain text and then forwarded. These usually aren't that important because they're jokes, stories, or faked emotionally moving pieces with cute puppies and talk about all the good fortune you'll have if you just forward this to another 100 people.......

Lastly, of course you are correct when you suggest that there is no point in complicating a simple email message. But those aren't the ones that bug. :-)

[TWC]

Jennifer, you ARE a hipster, aren't you?

Slummin', I have also noticed that a lot of Mac Guys use plain text. I may ask my Mac Guru cousin, Mr Jason Snell, The Cheese at Mac Publishing (go ahead and google him) if that is true.

And No, Randy, this isn't like the time I told you I was related to Peter Snell.

:-)