Email and composing messages

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Finally, it is time to go ranting about widely used software again. About how it lacks the most basic features, in favor of adding tons of bells and whistles. I will give a small introduction into how I usually compose and store my emails, to show how simple it can be.

Composing my emails

In this regard I keep it very basic, which means writing emails in plain text. The feature I use the most is the reference feature for plain text. Most good email viewers will render the citation number as a hyperlink, to the listed citation address. Here is a small example for if you never seen this before:

  Dear reader,

  Here is the fact of the day.
  Python is a programming language.[1]

  Best regards,

  Me

  [1] https://www.python.org/

And then the email viewer makes the occurrences of [1] clickable, redirecting to the website listed at the end. Besides plain text being more secure, I also just like the simplicity of it. Compared to doing in-text hyperlinks, this format also makes it easier to extract sources; they are right at the end of the document.

Unfortunately, the email program Outlook does not render citations like this, which is a program many people use. But atleast it renders the link as a hyperlink so it is still usable, but they are missing out on a great feature, that is for sure. What they are not missing out on, is a whole bunch of AI features that just consume enormous amounts of computing power. Like reading all your emails and giving AI suggestions, which is a feature I do not trust the “disable” toggle to actually disable. I do like the advanced features like email rules, yet another way to be a programmer, but I have had mixed succes with Outlook.

Other settings to consider is how to handle replies. Quoting in replies seems to have shifted towards replies above the original message, including the signature. So that you read the reply first, and only read the history if you are interested in that.

Fancy signatures

One aspect which I do like about HTML emails, is that you can have fancy signatures at the end of your message. In larger organisations, it helps to put proper contact information at the end. I usually do that in a smaller font and in italics, to make it look professional. It is one of the places where I do like putting hyperlinks, as it is just very practical and saves time on the other end.

Storing my emails

When I am done with emails, I simply archive them to keep my inbox clean. If I respond and still expect an answer, I move the sent email to a subfolder of sent so that I can quickly look into once in a while. And once a message comes in, I see it back in the thread of messages, so I can quickly archive the previous thread in favor of the more recent one in my inbox. This is also something that Outlook does not understand, it displays this subfolder elsewhere as another sent folder with that subfolder.

Conclusion

So I just use another client that does understand all these basic things, and has good defaults. If you are in control of the mail server, I can highly recommend Roundcube as the client, it has all the features I mentioned here. If you are looking for something that uses an existing mail adres for like work, I can recommend Thunderbird as it has good customization. If you like emacs, you probably have an email client on it already. If you like vim, there are also clients like Mutt/NeoMutt.