GMail will hide parts of a message that are similar to previous ones. When the entire message consists of what GMail considers to be quoted text, it doesn't really look like there's an email there. I just tried this myself and in the second password reset email, I only see a button with three little dots that says "show trimmed content" when I mouse over it. It's tiny and I wouldn't expect someone to figure it out if they didn't spend some time looking or have an idea of what happened.
So use it then. alpine (the successor to pine) is my daily email client. I currently have 161,210 messages in my inbox, it handles it just fine.
It's still supported, and has new features like UTF-8 support and viewing HTML emails (without the images).
It's better than any other email program I've used with one exception: No images in HTML email (although you can view an HTML email in your browser, the attachments don't come along).
I use this - it's way more responsive and faster than the current gmail UI.
My only gripe with the basic html version is that the back button is broken when you're trying to go back to search results after clicking on an email (you need to click on "Go back to search results").
are you sure your recipients
aren't
seeing emails that look like
this?
Sending plain text emails that look good when nearly every email client is mostly only tested with html emails is actually very difficult, and sometimes simply impossible. Format=Flowed doesn't always fix this. Plain text emails are defacto deprecated just because a lot very popular email clients don't handle them well.
One major problem with plain text emails is the standard was created when nearly everyone had a screen wide enough to display at least 78 characters per line (or whatever it was). Today people spend most of their time on screens much narrower than that. FF is a half assed solution to that problem
html was designed to work on a much wider variety of screen sizes so it works much better for email.
I say this as an offlineimap/mu4e user who knows some of my recipients are seeing bad formatting and doesn't really care.
> I say this as an offlineimap/mu4e user who knows some of my recipients are seeing bad formatting and doesn't really care.
This basically describes me (though substitute "bower" for "mu4e").
[edit]
It occurs to me that it would be relatively simple to write a filter that converts text e-mails to a multipart with an html e-mail having the same text.
Still no solution to replying to html e-mails inline, but the intersection of (Doesn't topost) and (uses html e-mail preferrentially to text e-mail) is relatively small.
Author here. The one you got is yet another bug. It's also possible that the behavior changed since.
In the case I described, the email is not opened with only 3 dots showing, it is instead completely collapsed. Like if you clicked the header to collapse it manually.
I know it hides similar parts of a series of emails because it cuts off my email salutation and sometimes people think that I'm being disrespectful. I wish I could stop it from doing that.
If true, I wonder how similar these emails were to have that happen.
Actually, GMail expands the most recent email and collapses older messages. (I just double checked.) So the premise of the article seems a bit misguided.
