> I find that a very large percentage of the html email I receive is actually hurting readability by way of formatting.
This is exactly right. In principle, html is just as convenient, but in practice it regularly fails. Something I really hate is a message with big images that add nothing. If I have to scan a message to figure out what's being said, there's a high probability I will leave it for later, which means it never gets read at all.
I would say that the real performance drain is top posting, which seems to go hand in hand with HTML emails.
With top posting, in order to read a mail - especially one that is a few levels deep in a thread - becomes an exercise in jumping back and forth, trying to find context and make sense of who replies to what, finding relevant sentences (often hidden in a mess of signatures).
With bottom posting and proper curated quoting, context is a glance away, and it's easy to see who said what in reply to what.
I'm sure this would be possible with HTML mails as well, but I've never seen it happen. It's all just a mess of hard to find information in the least sensible order imaginable.
It is not, so long as you first quote the relevant part you are replying to.
At some point you can also trim the tail as you see fit (I don't find it necessary because my mail client does a good enogh job at hiding that part unless I click on a "show wverything" button.
Technically it appears that I'm advocating for a combination of inline and top posting. Quoting the relevant wikipedia part:
> The interleaved reply style can also be combined with top-posting: selected points are quoted and replied to, as above, and then a full copy of the original message is appended.
Indeed, it would be nice if the netizens of the world would wake up to this. Sadly, I think it's unlikely to improve any time soon and so I'll stick to top posting and threading in the email client.
it's 99% psychological but I also 100% agree. Just posted a top level comment about how it has absolutely changed my life with regards to email. If you're having trouble keeping up with email and aren't afraid of the command line i _highly_ recommend using a cli client. Neomutt is a bitch to set up because there aren't any good action oriented docs, but it's been worth every bit of effort. There are other clients that are much easier to set up (like alpine) but neomutt has so much power and for me being able to write in markdown and convert to HTML for normal folks was a requirement.
the 1% that isn't psychological is how much faster _everything_ is when dealing with a plaintext client (neomutt in my case). "Power Users" use the keyboard to navigate gmail. Normal (neo)mutt users use those _all_ the time and they're faster because there's so much less for the computer to do with each keystroke.
This isn't a thing, which makes me think you're arguing in bad faith.
Clients load images asynchronously, and no personal email is sent with a logo and catchphrase header. I've never seen that in my entire life and I've been using email with a lot of people, for a long time.
Formatting is an issue however, and the addition of formatting to email can be useful and add to the conversation.
To take the hn example again, the text portion of your comment is broken on mobile because hn doesn't support proper formatting. This has made your comment harder to read.
Asking for permission before rendering external images != not loading at all, even though we could live without external images and just include everything inline.
That may be the reason for some people. I disallow loading images until I click, for security and privacy reasons. But I want to see pictures of my aunt's dog if she sends it.
