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Re:Use plaintext email by DarkCrusader2 on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @07:34AM (#20514094)
The page footer might interest you. It directly answers your question.

Quoting

  "But if plaintext is so good, why is this page written in HTML?" 
  This is a reference document, not an email, you twit.
Re:Use plaintext email by wongarsu on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @07:41AM (#20514144)
But emails can be reference documents too! In fact I would argue most work emails that are longer than a few lines are a reference document of some sort.
Re:Use plaintext email by upofadown on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @08:22AM (#20514432)
Then you are better off using some format that can stand alone as a file such as PDF. If it is a reference document that is intended to be edited on an ongoing basis it is better to use something like a wiki. Having to root around in your email to find a reference document is pretty inefficient and annoying.
Re:Use plaintext email by wongarsu on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @08:31AM (#20514505)
All of the reasons given against HTML emails hold at least equally well against PDF: it's a vector for phishing and tracking, ripe with client vulnerabilities, less accessible and not displayable on a terminal. For me as a reader having to read both an E-Mail and the attached PDF is also annoying, and many people will simply skip reading the PDF.
Re:Use plaintext email by throw0101a on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @08:53AM (#20514697)
> For me as a reader having to read both an E-Mail and the attached PDF is also annoying, and many people will simply skip reading the PDF.

See also embedding (e.g.) a JPEG in a Word document and then attaching that Word document to an e-mail.

Re:Use plaintext email by na85 on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @09:16AM (#20514920)
I've seen so many Word or PPT documents with a single hyperlink in them, uploaded to SharePoint with filenames like "process_manual_2013_v3.2.doc"...

Ugh.

Re:Use plaintext email by throw0101a on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @10:17PM (#20522051)
Just ran across this: an HTML e-mail that is only a link (i.e., HTML <head> refresh):

* https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ch83sz/why_the_he...

Re:Use plaintext email by upofadown on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @09:07AM (#20514831)
If you have an employee generating phishing and tracking reference PDFs in your organization then you really have a personnel problem.
Re:Use plaintext email by lawn on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @09:03AM (#20514784)
We send syntax highlighted code all the time via email at my job. I hope you're not suggesting we should use PDF instead?

And no, creating snippets on a wiki is also an extra unnecessary step. Email is just easier and faster.

Re:Use plaintext email by adtac on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @04:00PM (#20519059)
why not let people syntax highlight the way they want? some people dislike syntax highlighting, some like high contrast highlighting, some like blue-tinted highlighting, etc. why do you get to decide for everyone what colour strings should be?

send the plaintext code snippet and they'll decide.

Re:Use plaintext email by upofadown on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @09:11AM (#20514866)
Syntax highlighted code can hardly be considered a "reference document".
Re:Use plaintext email by bgdnyxbjx on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @12:22PM (#20516778)
For the life of me I can’t remember the syntax for a particular thing I do in the JavaScript console at work. Someone showed me the trick in an email about seven years ago and about once a month I need to do this thing so I search my inbox for the email so I can remember the syntax.
Re:Use plaintext email by sterkekoffie on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @11:44AM (#20516372)
It might be "easier and faster" to send an email than to, for instance, upload to a dedicated snippet manager, but literally everything after than that is slower and more difficult.
Re:Use plaintext email by C1sc0cat on Thursday July 25, 2019 @06:12AM (#20524114)
And if its a reference document it should be in source control and properly versioned - not to go all BS5750/ISO 9000 here :-)
Re:Use plaintext email by taneq on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @09:16AM (#20514912)
Exactly, work mailboxes are a treasure trove of automatically-archived information. I'd argue that these days, emails form more of a "knowledge base" than any other single repository of information for most organisations.
Re:Use plaintext email by kgwxd on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @09:24AM (#20514992)
This is very true and yet the search tools supplied with these knowledge bases are terribly inadequate. Is there a better, standalone tool out there for turning email archives, from multiple sources, into a usable database with a powerful query language?
Re:Use plaintext email by jgtrosh on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @09:56AM (#20515281)
Not sure if that's what you're looking for, but you could use notmuch[0]. Haven't used it a lot, but I think it can import an mbox? Maybe you can merge multiple mboxes together?

[0]: https://notmuchmail.org

Re:Use plaintext email by kgwxd on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @01:42PM (#20517626)
I looked into that a few times, just haven't had the patience to get through the setup process. Maybe I'll get it done this time. There goes my afternoon :)
Re:Use plaintext email by kgwxd on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @09:05PM (#20521735)
7 hours later: Now I remember why I never got it running, it's an impossible task to accomplish.
Re:Use plaintext email by taneq on Thursday July 25, 2019 @12:50PM (#20526990)
I was keeping an eye on this in the hope that someone had a good answer for it. What features would you consider adequate for this kind of email search? At the moment I just have everything in Thunderbird and it does a passable full-text search on a ~5gb mailbox but I haven't experimented with anything fancier.
Re:Use plaintext email by Alex3917 on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @10:57AM (#20515893)
https://www.fwdeveryone.com

No query language yet, but you can export the cleaned up email threads and then query them however you want.

Re:Use plaintext email by masukomi on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @09:58AM (#20515301)
email is a terrible place to keep reference documents.

"where's the information on that?" "oh, you should have it in your email somewhere. I think I got one a few months ago about it"

no. just. no. If you care _at all_ about your reference documents you get them out of email ASAP.

And that's ignoring that anyone can delete old emails and thus not have what you considered a reference doc but they just considered old mail. Or that the server could loose your emails and no-one has they synced locally these days.

Re:Use plaintext email by u801e on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @10:05AM (#20515389)
> email is a terrible place to keep reference documents.

Newsgroups are better in that regard. You can reference the message using the message-id value. A lot of newsgroups would have FAQS posted every 30 days or so. A reference document that's periodically updated could be sent the same way.

Re:Use plaintext email by cylentwolf on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @02:14PM (#20518001)
Isn't this what Slack is trying to do for the workplace? A messaging system that provides reference history?
Re:Use plaintext email by Sir_Cmpwn on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @11:13AM (#20516044)
If your emails are reference documents then I would argue that you're using email wrong.
Re:Use plaintext email by DangitBobby on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @10:26AM (#20515593)
That's pretty much a non-sequitur. HTML is better in email as well as "reference documents" according to the opinions of many. You don't like thing. Okay.
Re:Use plaintext email by 6c696e7578 on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @03:00PM (#20518471)
RFC 822 is plaintext. That's a reference document. Don't see why HTML would be an argument for a reference document. In fact, tex is a good format for reference documents, it diff's well and can produce .ps/.pdf outputs among others.
Re:Use plaintext email by jve on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @07:40AM (#20514131)
Fair. I like that minimal formatting there anyway.

But often I have to communicate via email, report on complex issues, etc. It is nice to have some headings, tables, images in there.

Re:Use plaintext email by DarkCrusader2 on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @07:44AM (#20514168)
Agreed. As much as I like plain text email personally, having inline images etc. is really helpful sometimes.
Re:Use plaintext email by mavhc on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @07:49AM (#20514200)
The key is sometimes. Plain text by default, rich text when required.

Software that would strip all html out of emails for security would be handy

Re:Use plaintext email by u801e on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @09:06AM (#20514820)
Before MIME was common, people used to insert uuencoded data within the email message. IIRC, certain email clients would display the decoded content inline with the surrounding text.
Re:Use plaintext email by C1sc0cat on Thursday July 25, 2019 @06:13AM (#20524120)
Why not use MS Word or some other tool designed for writing documents then ?
Re:Use plaintext email by holy_city on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @01:50PM (#20517726)
Am I crazy for using email to send memos? Those serve as reference documents too, while creating a papertrail.
Re:Use plaintext email by a3n on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @11:19AM (#20516108)
The very last clause in that sentence answers a question that I hadn't even thought to ask.

I thought it was very odd for what is essentially a marketing post.

Re:Use plaintext email by dpau on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @07:48AM (#20514195)
ha! and i really love the design of this site- just the right amount of design & css styling to elegantly communicate the message..