On 26 Feb 2026, at 12:11, Martin S Taylor wrote: > I certainly don’t. Can you point to somewhere which explains it?
There used to be elegant discussions of the subject but they now seem to be swamped by the marketeers' guff. The European Commission has something to say on the subject, ironically it's in the form of a PDF. E-mail should always be plain text, because that was how it was developed and how many of the conventions that we've grown used to in text communication, such as asterisks for **emphasis** or underlines for __highlighting__ and even emojis, were developed. Add to these replying below, selecting text to quote and threading. All great ideas that have, more or less, had to be reinvented in everything that has tried to replace e-mail. Back in the early 1970s bandwidth was extremely limited so every character in e-mail counted. There were also no screens that could render formatted text, so it was logical that all the effort went into the content of the e-mail and not how you wanted it to look. After all, you didn't know what kind of machine your correspondent was working on. Images and files came later as attachments and were just added as binary streams. The e-mail format is fairly flexible as it allows nesting of almost any type within a part. Simple but really useful for forwarding e-mails. HTML itself was also developed with little thought for presentation for similar reasons, it was supposed to make structuring documents easier and more consistent. But the marketing department of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and others had other ideas. Nowadays HTML with CSS has fairly robust rules for consistent presentation but the rendering engine that was used for the first HTML e-mails was Internet Explorer and it produced something that really could only be read in the same browser, embedded in Outlook. This was done with the more or less explicit aim of forcing people to switch to using Outlook for e-mail. In order for HTML to work in e-mail, it had to be pretty verbose with lots of tags for the simplest of things. The result then has to be "encoded" into UU (unix-to-unix) format and you need the plain text version as well. This means that HTML mails are generally **at least** three times the size of a plain text one. And they don't say any more, often less. If you look at any professional authoring software, or presentation guides, you'll see that the focus should always be on the content. You make things look good only once you know what you're going to say. And I personally find that, writing plain text helps me focus on **what** I want to say, **how** I want to phrase it and not on what it might look like. That's actual productivity. And the whole thing about Courier as **the** typeface for plain text is absolute nonsense. This was a decision taken by Microsoft possibly to mimic the other mail programs of the time, which used fixed space fonts, not just out of tradition, but because aligning text in things like tables was desired. But mail clients have always been free to choose whatever typeface they want to display e-mails. Courier, along with Arial and other typefaces in Windows were infamously designed on the cheap so that Microsoft wouldn't have to pay licence fees and designers have been moaning ever since… I think that Microsoft stuck with Courier in attempt to punish those who chose to continue to put content above style. Having used plain text for years, I decided to follow Benny's lead and let Mailmate produce HTML for those what want to read it. I continue to write in and read plain text and always recommend others do. Right, I'm off to join Bill and other oldtimers for a virtual beer muttering about great things were once 14,400 kb/s lines became available! ;-) Charlie -- Charlie Clark Sengelsweg 34 Düsseldorf D- 40489 Tel: +49-203-746000 Mobile: +49-178-782-6226 _______________________________________________ mailmate mailing list Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
