Feature suggestion: Format emails sent out for post notifications to be more readable

[tanvibhakta]

Mataroa allows readers of a blog to subscribe via email (simulating a newsletter). These emails are sent in plaintext. This can make the posts quite hard to read if you are using more verbose markdown features, like footnotes or several links in succession.

I propose sending the html rendered from the markdown instead. We can simply use the html to doc feature from markdown already being used to render the files to render the email content.

Motivation

I have spent some effort convincing people to get off of social media posting and substack. Mataroa is my go-to alternative but my less technical friends are not enthusiastic about switching because of the email formatting. I am hoping this small fix will make the platform more appealing to those who want to participate in the IndieWeb.

I would like to work on this feature.

[sirodoht]

Hi @tanvibhakta! Thanks for submitting this issue.

I have chosen plain text because HTML in email can enable some problematic functionality. Specifically:

• Email tracking. This works by including an image that's hosted in another server and then every time an email is opened, the email client will load that image, informing the remote server of the exact time and amount of times the user opens that email. I find that a bit disturbing.
• Broken compatibility across clients. Email HTML is a subset of the regular HTML that web browsers run. This makes it quite hard to produce HTML with a consistent design across different email clients.
• Accessibility. Due to the lack of standardisation in HTML for Email accessibility becomes an issue. In order to achieve the same result across different clients we have to use workarounds that make it quite hard for people who use a screen reader.
• Security. Due to HTML being designed for a browser, defining a secure subset has proven to be quite difficult as there are many vulnerabilities that leak through. In addition to that, it's much easier to trick people if you're hiding a link under an image. This can't happen in plain text.

I think you're right in that a lot of people find it weird and potentially problematic that mataroa sends plain text emails and I have thought about changing it, potentially adopting a very strict HTML subset. However I'm still not sure it's worth it. What do you think given the above limitations?

[ChiWilliams]

I know this is late to the party, but I figured I would chime in with my perspective.

My pain points with the plain text emails go as follows (in order of priority):

1. No headers, so it's very difficult to write a readable longer post
2. Links have the [name of link](linkurl) syntax, which both takes up a lot of space and the link itself is still underlined in blue (at least in Gmail)
3. Other basic markdown syntax, like italics, bolds, and code blocks
4. Markdown formatting syntax doesn't show (but often this isn't an issue, because it's just lines)
5. The font used in emails is the default font; would love this to be serif if the blog format was serif.
6. Footnotes don't show up
7. No images

For me, just having (1) would go a long way. Everything else would be nice but definitely start to run into the limitations you mention above. I don't know how difficult making headers larger and bolder would be, but if it's easy, it would be a nice quality of life improvement.

Thank you again!