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Email is a good working medium since many years using plain text. As some prefer to send emails with some formattings as HTML, they also provide a plain-text-part containing the same content. But the E-Mail from Stackoverflow notifying me about new answers for my questions is formatted as HTML and the text-part only says I should read it as HTML. Please can you duplicate the informations in the text-part, otherwise this email-notification is useless.

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3 Answers 3

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Ok, we have a rudimentary GeneratePlainTextFromHtml function in there now. Results may not be optimal, but for most of our emails, which are minimally HTML formatted, it should be reasonable.

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  • Thanks alot. Most interesting is, that I became this answer as the first email-notification with plain text - and I thinks that's working for me. Thank you!
    – Mnementh
    Oct 12, 2009 at 22:31
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    I just noticed the plain-text emails look horrible. They could be easily, and vastly improved by compressing the whitespace and adding URLs back to this mentioned post. Example: i.imgur.com/9tl6Gdl.png
    – Quinn Comendant
    Dec 24, 2014 at 3:37
  • Thanks for this. I have opened a separate question regarding the utility of the current plain-text notifications: meta.stackexchange.com/q/275831/192196
    – Psychonaut
    Feb 18, 2016 at 11:07
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Wow. Just wow.

I've never set a notification for a question, so I hadn't spotted this before, but I can't see why on earth an email system would be setup like this.

My email client is setup to dump html to text if I get html only mail, but it doesn't really handle situations where someone bothers to have a text part containing useless crap. Luckily this usually only happens with marketing junk, which i happily delete :)

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All you need to do is include the text URL link to the post. That's it. Should be easy to implement. Not making Plain Text email workable is not very progressive. Especially for a website regularly discussing cutting edge stuff. This is a great website, with an endless amount of learning possibilities here. Its worth it.

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    You do realize that you're replying to a problem that was solved almost six years ago ... ?
    – Martin Tournoij
    Feb 23, 2016 at 4:48
  • You would think that in 6 years they could have solved this problem. Unless you want viruses you just don't use HTML email by default. Its just so unnecessary.
    – Bob
    Feb 23, 2016 at 7:00
  • Carpetsmoker, the specific problem Bob is referring to has not been solved. @Bob, I have already opened a separate question for the issue of missing URLs in the plain-text version of the notification: meta.stackexchange.com/q/275831/192196 You may want to vote and/or comment there instead.
    – Psychonaut
    Feb 23, 2016 at 10:14
  • Thank you Psychonaut. I read that link you mentioned and it was fantastic. Well presented and backed up logically. Didn't see how to vote. Maybe because I'm new here and don't have the ability yet. Added a positive comment about his post though. Many viruses can be so easily avoided using Plain Text yet so few Windows users realize it. Mac users are much less aware. Linux users are probably well aware. What email programs should have is a keyboard shortcut for de-activating and activating Plain Text so it can be instantly used when occasionally needed, but on by default.
    – Bob
    Feb 25, 2016 at 17:00

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