If you’ve watched Perry Metzger’s Emacs Conference 2019 talk, as I hope you have, you’ll know that Metzger believes that modern Email should be carried as HTML. He wants—needs, he says—to see his colleagues emails exactly as they were written and to let those colleagues see his emails exactly as he has written them. Here’s a quote from one of his slides explaining why he no longer reads emails in Emacs:
Modern email is HTML. I need to see HTML email the way my colleagues see it. I have no choice. It’s not 1992 any more.
I can sympathize. Metzger is a technical guy doing technical work and he can’t afford to have the ideas in his communications with his colleagues mangled by the email presentation layer. Still, I really, really hate HTML emails and I’m not alone. I’m aware that at this point that’s a rearguard reaction but it’s a view held by many, even—or perhaps especially—by those in the technical fields. Metzger’s probably right but I still hate it.
Paul Graham also has a view on the issue:
The more formatting your email has, the less I want to read it. A short, plain text email reads as a message to me. If you use bulleted lists and different typefaces, it looks like spam.
— Paul Graham (@paulg) June 19, 2019
I didn’t realize it until after I saw his tweet but that’s exactly how I feel. When I see an HTML email with multiple fonts and fancy formatting, I can be pretty certain it’s trash. Perhaps I need to start hanging out with Metzger’s colleagues. Or perhaps I’m just hopelessly reactionary.