I had some tech friends a few years ago that despised HTML email with the heat of a fiery sun. They even had tag lines that stated TEXT Email ONLY. Primarily because of virus concerns. But also because plain text is easier to copy/paste and work with. Older Techs like me started on mainframes using pure ASCII text. Vax email was plain text. I think Pine (Unix) was plain text.
I pretty much agreed. These days I don’t think Gmail gives us a choice. It’s HTML whether you want it or not. I still don’t put formatting in my emails. You won’t catch me centering, bolding, underlining, and embedding graphics. I type in straight text and hit send.
One of my pet peeves is pasting into Gmail or Hotmail. You google the name of a book, select and copy. Paste and the letters are freaking HUGE. Congratulations you just got pawned by HTML. You have to ctrl-z (to undo this crap) and paste into Notepad to strip off that stinking formatting. Select, copy and then paste into the email window. I’ve got where I automatically clean any text that I get off the web with Notepad first. It’s a shame you have to wash the damn formatting off text before you can use it.
How do you feel about text? Post your age range too. I suspect us old timers that started with Text prefer Text. HTML seems popular with the young crowd. But the poll will let us know.
I mostly don’t care. There are times, however, I want to highlight text in an email, or maybe bold or underline. I switch to HTML when necessary. ( Unless it’s already HTML, I really have no idea why some of my emails come in as HTML and some as text, and I don’t notice unless I’m trying to do some formatting)
I forgot to mention. If you do screw up and paste formatted text into Gmail (large fonts, bolded etc.) that part of your email will have that formatting. Type something in and it will be in that stupid huge font too. That’s why ctrl-z is the only way to back out of this mess. Backspacing will still leave that darn formatting in your message.
Ms Word is the same. Paste in formatted text and that part of your document now has that formatting. Typing in additional sentences gets formatted like that. A major PITA unless you wanted that formatting. I’ve actually had to quit my document (without saving) and restart just to back out of a mess like that.
I miss Word Perfects Reveal Codes. It was so simple to clean a screwed up document. Turn on Reveal Codes, find the Font code or maybe a Bold Code and delete it. Simple as pie. Word took that away from us.
HTML here. 44 years old. I’m pretty sure I’ve used a “remove formatting” option in Gmail. I’ll check next time I’m on a PC. I don’t see it on my phone’s app, but I find it a little less functional when composing email in general.
Formatting can cause all kinds of hilarity. Ever paste in text from the web and notice later it was a different font? You are typing in Ariel and your pasted text is New Times Roman. Stands out like a turd on a white sheet.
I get a lot of text from the web. I’m not wasting time trying to figure out how to spell Christiane Amanpour. I google it and confirm my spelling there. Copy/paste that way there’s no chance of a spelling error in a document that I send to my boss.
I just tried pasting in Gmail. Right Click didn’t show a paste special in the menu. I got a ugly blue color and big font when I pasted some text from a google search. Maybe somewhere in Gmail there is a paste special, and I just haven’t seen it.
Select whatever you’ve pasted (or select all), then click on the A to the right of the “Send” button at the bottom of the text box, then click on the Tx at the far right of the little box that appears.
ETA: I’m also seeing right-click “Paste and Match Style”; I’m using Chrome.
Doesn’t matter to me. I’m 47, which is old enough to have learned BASIC on a TRS-80 back in high school and also to have been in the vanguard when e-mail accounts were first awarded at the office (yes, awarded–you had to plead your case that it would actually be beneficial to your job to have access).
I know of and have used the paste-first-to-Notepad trick but more often will use the aforementioned Paste Special options in MS products. Also note the Google Chrome browser has a specific paste-as-plain-text option in the right-click menu and as a specific keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-Shift-V).
Age 60 here. I loathe HTML e-mail. More accurately, I loathe getting e-mails where the sender has used HTML to highlight new text (usually responses to questions) in the body of previously sent text. My e-mail client is set to interpret all e-mails as plain text so all those easy-to-see (with HTML) changes or highlights are hard to separate out. Nope, plain text for me.
RULES
(1) Write your e-mails assuming your target can only see them as plain text.
(2) Don’t include any useless images.
(3) Business senders only: If HTML you must, at least check what they look like to plain-text recipients.
ASGUY - Currently involved in a long term four-way e-mail exchange in which the other three absolutely love the HTML capabilities of e-mail. Arrrrgh!
P.S. I actually know HTML coding. I hand code simple web sites for friends and the group mentioned above. But HTML is for web pages, not e-mail. Microsoft, I hate you.
I once had to make a company newsletter that was regularly sent via email. That had a legitimate reason for it being HTML, as it was all embedded imagery and had to match the company brand.
Aside from that (and even including that, really) I don’t like HTML emails at all. Wholly unnecessary 99% of the time and just gets in the way.
At work, I use a variety of programs and applications, and at any given time one or more of them is buggy and/or broken. I need to send images of error messages and weird outcomes to the people responsible for fixing them.
I also tend to use formatting for emphasis. There are so many things wrong that I need to specify that step 3 is non-negotiable and absolutely must be fixed. Otherwise, they are prone to fixing something else and leaving the real problem unresolved.
I have a Notepad Icon in my Quicklaunch menu, and I normally have one running minimized on my screen all day. I just keep opening it and putting notes to myself in it, as well as any text I want to email. Then just copy/paste out of it for emailing.
I find this thread and the opinions on plain text very interesting. My company switched to Gmail a few years ago, and of course most of the emails I deal with are from coworkers. HTML is ubiquitous and I don’t know why it’s an issue for others. I’d say the vast majority of extra-company emails I get are HTML, and those that are to/from individuals are also HTML. I have taken it for granted and as a natural evolution of email.
Gmail has a “block images” option as well as the “unformat text” option, but I rarely use them. My personal email is Yahoo and it has similar options, but I have no need to use them.
Those who are opposed to HTML, what is it that makes it a big problem, specifically? There’s mention above that it “gets in the way” but I don’t really understand what that means. Is it due to slow connections, it takes too long to load if it’s got graphics and pictures? I get clickable coupons and sale flyers and such, what happens to those when forced into plain text?
I do that thing with answering questions in colored text, why would you want to specifically block that? It really makes answering a long list of questions easier and shorter without having to copy and re-format what the asking emailer wrote, with new paragraphs and trying to break it out clearly into Q and A that’s understandable.
Is it that some email programs (like Outlook and the like) have a hard time following the formatting so you end up with weird looking pages, something else?
I just haven’t dealt with non-HTML email in several years, so I’m not getting why it’s a huge problem for some. Maybe I don’t use it enough to be a problem? I guess I need it explained to me like I’m four.
77 here. I have used email for very nearly 30 years (since Nov. 1984). I use two different e-readers. One, pine, can’t handle html. But it has some capabilities that the other, a version of webmail, doesn’t. And vice versa. But I never send anything but plain text and attachments (which are usually pdf).
