Last week, I wrote about Perry Metzger’s reasons for not using Emacs to read his email. His take on email is something on the order of, “These days, email is HTML. Deal with it.” Many of us would rather not deal with it but Metzger’s point is well taken. An awful lot of email (maybe even most) comes to you as HTML.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, NukedTeas writes that he’s just had his first, “Gee, I wish I were writing this email in Emacs” moment and goes on to say that he’s going to have to figure out how to do that. The comments were of two types. First, there were the supporters who offered advice on how to do that—mostly mu4e or Notmuch along with offlineimap or mbsync to retrieve the mail.

There was another group of commenters, though, typified by kingpatzer who said that “It’s actually impossible to do email in Emacs”. That comes as a shock to the many of us who do just that everyday. Kingpatzer’s real point, of course, is the same as Metzger’s: Emacs doesn’t render HTML emails very well and most of our email is HTML. A surprising number of commenters agreed or made the same point.

I’m more inclined to agree with oantolin who suggests, “Just stop reading email that isn’t plaintext, I doubt anyone will notice”. That’s a bit smart-alecky, perhaps, but it hints at something that might be true: Most email that comes to you as HTML only is probably not worth reading. I’ve certainly found that true. Almost all of it is commercial messages of one sort or another. There are a few exceptions. The ACM, to its everlasting shame, sends its emails in a form that can’t be rendered in plain text and even EWW doesn’t do a great job with them. Of course, when that happens I just type a v and it pops me into the my browser and displays it there. That’s a bit of a pain but only a bit and it’s more than made up for by doing the majority of my email work in Emacs.

The other point worth making is that most non-spam email that comes as HTML has no reason to be HTML. If you’re an Emacs user, one would expect that most of the people you communicate with know that and send plain text. Sadly, that’s not the case. The only real answer is that given by Metzger: fix Emacs so it can render HTML well. That’s not easy, of course, but it’s definitely worthwhile.