I dislike that email, which predates the web, adopted html. And quite frustrated that many clients do not attach an equivalent plain text version of the email.

I thought this would be a problem, but frankly piping in everything into w3m makes it surprisingly easy to stay plain text only if desired.

At the risk of being accused of being on your lawn, what do you dislike about email's adoption of HTML? I'm old enough to remember the walled garden "mail" of Prodigy and early AOL, and the advent of inter-network electronic mail, but I feel like HTML is a major contributing factor to taking email from something people didn't realize they had ("AOL gives me e-mail?") to something we can't live without now.

Aside from spam, I mean marketing emails, what email do you send or receive that needs HTML?

> that needs HTML?

I think you are setting the bar a little too high. It seems to me like there is quite a bit of mail that benefits from HTML. Superscripts, subscripts, italics, bold and colored text (used in moderation), inline images (used in moderation) can be really useful when discussing concepts that aren't easily reduced to characters.

Suppose your email would benefit from some mathematical formulas. You can do the old standby and drop into latex math mode, but the person on the other end of the email might not understand what you mean by

\sum_{n=1}^k\,\frac{1}{n} \;=\; \ln k + \gamma + \varepsilon_k < \ln k + 1

much easier and clearer to use LaTeXiT or something similar and copy/paste in an inline image with the formula correctly formatted.

Or, say you are a taxonomist. Italics in species names are not just a stylistic choice, they also convey additional meaning. For example in

Epilobium ciliatum Raf. subsp. watsonii (Barbey) Hoch & P.H. Raven f. rosa

the italics show what parts of the full scientific name refer to the species and what parts refer to authors or levels of taxonomic organization (subspecies and form). You can't do that with plain text (you could of course do it with markdown, though)...

plain text is sufficient of course; but sometimes the additional bells and whistles of HTML really are useful.

I generally think /italics/ and bold, quoting "> ", ">> " etc work fine. In addition to utf-8 encoding, you've covered a lot of ground (for English-speakers, utf-8 might seem like a luxury, and of course, if you demand unicode support you're beyond "basic" plain text -- it is however what I mean when I say I prefer plain text emails).

Formulas an illustrations can usually just be appended (and while they won't be shown in-line most clients will display images (and those choosing clients that don't won't really complain), but yeah, if you need multimedia you need multimedia.

Now, I don't really see how an image of an equation is really enough -- if you're working with someone, you'd want them to be able to quote you, reply to you -- and most importantly, tweak your work (edit your equations). I'd argue such (genuinely rich documents) don't really belong in email. Use a wiki or something (and then you can email wiki-markup...).

In short, I'm not convinced all the down sides and added complexity of html mail is worth the hassle.

Are rich documents and hypertext (hypermedia) a good idea? Yes. Does it imply a truly object oriented system, essentially mailing each other runnable smalltalk code? Yes. Will that be secure? No. Will that be standardized? Not by the looks of things. This is essentially why office suites are a source of security holes and incompatibilities. And web apps (though differently).

These have been used for years/decades:

_underlined text_, bold text

* bulleted * list

titles ======

Many email clients will actually add the bolding and underlining to the above styled markup.

My default for gmail is sending plain text, but sometimes I will flip to html for bullets or if I am sending a project plan or some similar that I want formatted nicely.

But yeah, most of the time text I think that plain text works better.

I generally just:

    * use plaintext
    * bullets

(I suppose I could use some crazy utf-8 characters, but I generally don't).

More to the point - if layout is important, I'm more likely to mail someone a pdf - but I usually don't because I usually expect people to read mail in their mail reader. And that means respecting however they prefer to read mail (eg: background/foreground colour, font, quote-styling etc).

Then again, that used to be the way of the web too -- and now all browsers have basically given up on user stylesheets (and we all know we need to "reset" the CSS for a baseline for our "fancy" web page layouts...).

All that said, I'm not horribly against simple html in mail: No css, em/strong, h1..6, in-line images (with images bundled with the mail for privacy and off-line reasons) -- basically "rich text". But with a text/plain part!

The patched version of It's All Text! mentioned in the submitted blog post let's you edit the non-textarea textboxes on Google+.

(The blog post mentions my patch, but it was actually Github user patjak who got IAT! working with non-textareas, all I did was remove a bit of patjak's code to make the HTML passthrough unmodified to the editor.)

Oh, that's nice. Is the bundled up extension available for download? (I can't seem to find any instructions for that, but maybe I'm just not looking hard enough).

Thanks for pointing it out! (I do have some bad memories with things like these trying to keep up with a non-published, no-promisies-against-change, defacto-api like g+ edit-fields though...)

I don't think there is a bundled extension available. I personally don't know how to make one. To use it on my computer I just opened up the installed vanilla extension (turns out they are just compressed bundles of source code) and edited the files I found there by hand.

Yeah, works until the next automatic update... ;)