I wish people just sent plain text.

What about images, links? Formatted text like bold or underline?

I also prefer plain text, but in most of my emails I talk about technical stuff, or I send transactional emails that require actions, in which case showing buttons is a much better user experience than plain text.

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cxr an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Embedded images aren't really compatible with Markdown. They just aren't. (Oh, syntax for it is defined, all right (in Gruber's implementation, even). But it doesn't really cohere with the rest of Markdown—in the way that Markdown is an opinionated way of formatting your plain text documents so that they can optionally be mechanically translated for typesetting systems that have richer formatting options.)

Any serious Markdown-to-email should probably look like this:

Markdown, formatted as readable plain text (i.e., not the way that GitHub encourages people to treat it as just alternative "lightweight" markup syntax that you just tickle differently when you want the end result to show up how you want; Markdown is supposed to be readable in raw form) and sent as plain text email, no HTML or multipart/alternative in sight

A convention of including a special header (or trailer in the message body) that denotes to the mail client, "This is plain text, but it happens to be valid Markdown, and the author wishes to express their intent that it be treated as such, with richer formatting for the recipient (to be overridden at the recipient's desire)."

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loloquwowndueo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don’t want buttons in my emails.

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XCSme 3 hours ago | parent [-]

But they are a lot easier to see and click (accessibility, larger hit area).

You could have a larger text instead of a button, but changing font size is also HTML and not plain-text anymore.

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antiframe 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Every MUA I've used allows the reader to set a font size, so changing font sizes is 100% a feature of plain-text emails. Then they get the link the size they need to read it correctly and it's absolutely easy to read. This here comment is pain text. Is it hard to read this link:

http://microsoft.com/

I don't think so. I certainly didn't have to resort to HTML to make that link readable and clickable.

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loloquwowndueo 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don’t have problems seeing and clicking normal text, thank you very much. I don’t want buttons on my emails.

	▲	XCSme an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think the OP app is meant for creating transactional emails (or bulk-send emails like newsletters). Those templates should account for all types of people and accessibility levels (including things like ADHD, where you need a big red button to click, otherwise you get overwhelmed by a block of text).

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koakuma-chan 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can just send a link, and the user's client will probably highlight it even if it is plain text.

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recursivegirth 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yea, but how will they hide all the tracking URLs and base64 encoded PII from you in the email?

	▲	koakuma-chan 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Using a URL shortener obviously. But you are right, if they only send plain text, they won't be able to include those 1x1 images at the bottom to track whether you have opened the email. Any sane email client blocks images by default, but whatever.

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ape4 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, the first example on that site doesn't need any formatting. It just says your code is <code>

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linhns 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A picture is worth a thousand words.

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pembrook 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Plain text? Pffft.

Human language is an unnecessary abstraction, just like images.

I wish everyone would communicate in pure Binary.