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Tuesday 12 September 2017

Why I use text-only email

Text is simple. Text is clean. You can't embed a trojan in text, the way you can in HTML.

I used to use Pine; that is no longer available, so I use Alpine which is indistinguishable from Pine. It's text-only. You can "click on a link", but to do that you have to tab down to the link, it isn't a mouse thing. And it tells you where the link is going, in square brackets after the link, which can be quite different from where it says it's going.

And for the same reason, you can't click on an attachment. Which is good.

Unfortunately, the whole world seems to assume that everyone uses html-based email. And I even get emails that say "If your email reader doesn't do HTML, then click here". Which, of course, I can't.

If you're using linux, I can recommend Alpine. It's free, it's easy to get and easy to use. If you're using Windows, you're probably stuffed.

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