Cool idea! AFAIK emails are just sent as text but the client renders them when you read them. Theoretically it wouldn't be hard to send markdown and add a header that indicates the body is markdown. Hard part is integrating support into the client. Since HTML is more verbose than markdown, and you can often mix markdown and HTML, this could actually lead to space and data savings!
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
19 points (95.2% liked)
Asklemmy
47162 readers
494 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
I think the idea is for your mail client to translate your Markdown into HTML before sending. To convince the whole worldβs email ecosystem to directly support Markdown would be an impossibly large lift given that HTML is already virtually universally supported.
Yeah, that's the idea.
Yeah, some clients allow you to compose in html so I just copy paste from my markdown editor. But it would be nice to skip the copy paste part and just to parse the markdown directly on the client. Also the markdown renderer fails, the markdown is already human readable. So that would be cool.
Tangentially: I generally prefer plain text in email, but I really like this idea. Apparently someone in the Emacs ecosystem thought of this, though that probably doesnβt help you. Enhance Your Emails with Org Mode
I do prefer plain text as well, and I have tried Org mode, just not all the way. So I wil eventually give it a full go. Thank you!
Evolution does.
Thanks for the recommendation, I very quickly found "Markdown Here Revival" for Betterbird. Sorry that I don't have a recommendation for you though.
no worries