HTML in mailing lists

A while back, I was investigating mailing lists on sr.ht. I was a bit peeved when I was testing and found that they rejected all html emails. I asked on their irc channel, and was met with explanations boiling down to “html bad”, which I don’t disagree with, but don’t believe email should be purged of all text/html emails.

Accessibility is important

When you tie mailing lists to filing issues, you need to make those mailing lists as accessible as possible. Sure, I could configure my email client to send out plaintext-only emails (although its a real pain), but I can’t expect everyone to know how to configure their email client for this.

And on a more personal note, filing an issue or pull request for your project should not require me to reconfigure software on my machine.

Widespread belief

I was recently looking to send to other, unrelated, mailing lists. I found this same rule for many other mailing lists.

Note also that the list only accepts plain-text email; please disable HTML in your outgoing messages.

Spam filters are also more likely to reject HTML-formatted messages; please use plain text.

This is not singled-out to just sr.ht, but a widespread belief! Does the widespread developer community believe end-users with no knowledge of the complications of email mime-types should not be able to contribute to discussion?

My personal problems

The reason I am actually upset about this is because I send html-formatted emails all the time, to clients and friends, with very small amounts of formatting (mostly links and code blocks). I’ve jury-rigged my mail client (neomutt) to let me write emails in markdown and on send it translates them to a multipart markdown/html email. I am very content with this, and it just works.

Except when a mailing list rejects anything with html.

Solution?

Choosing a default is hard. On the one hand, I need to send formatted emails to clients (text/html). On the other, I would like to send emails to mailing lists (no text/html).

I could have a variable defaulted to empty string containing all mime types I want to translate to.

I think simple solution is to just bind Y(y is what I use for fancy multipart) to just send email as-is.