Hi Adrian,
> On 16. Jan, 2021, at 23:46, Adrian Klaver <adrian.klaver@aklaver.com> wrote:
>
> That is trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
yes, but sometimes, just sometimes, things in the olden days were just better. :-)
> Too many GUI email interfaces these days that use 'advanced` formatting. I use Thunderbird and it allows me to
convertincoming to plain text on the fly. Not a perfect system, but it cuts down on a lot of the garish content.
I'm on a Mac w/ Big Sur (macOS 11.1) and use Apple Mail. I've been on Macs since 2003. Apple Mail is simple to use and
Ilove it for exactly that. But Apple Mail has everything I expect a mail client to have, it does not allow a couple of
thingswhich other mail clients might have. Some people hate it for exactly that. I set Mail to always compose in plain
textbut there is no way of manipulating incoming mails other than that automatic displaying remote content (HTML links,
etc.)can (and should) be turned off.
Asking our ex don't-be-evil friend revealed a setting for Apple Mail:
defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE
But that doesn't work (anymore?), at least not with Big Sur.
So I sometimes resort to either hit cmd-opt-u to see the mail text raw source, or better yet, just hit reply and then
dropthe reply after reading. As I set composing to plain text, it will convert any quoted parts. Sometimes, I just
copy/pastethe whole mail for reading over to TextMate, which is also sub-optimal but obviously also gives me
non-proportionalfont reading.
Still, this is somewhat cumbersome as I have to do that for each mail individually. Thank god, this doesn't happen too
often.Yet, it's still annoying enough.
> That is a learning curve thing. Many people don't know that copy and paste exists for terminals/GUI's/etc. Most
people,once they are pointed in the right direction, will change that habit. That is why I would not advocate dropping
nonplain text attachments. Take this as a teaching moment and explain the reason why text is a benefit.
I guess, they only change their behavior because copying/pasting some text is easier to do than creating a windowshot
withaligning the frame manually, etc. But whatever the reason, thank god, some people are willing to learn that if
beingtold.
Cheers,
Paul