> I mean, I too used to enjoy reading email in a terminal. It felt fun twenty years ago. Over a modem connection. But I really don't think we can go back to it, and even less should we romanticize it as if that was "the true old days."

Why? I've used mutt as my primary email client for 12 years now. I get that most people aren't interested by that, nor am I trying to tell you you should do it, but I'd at least like to point out that it's fully possible, and I have no problem dealing with HTML mail. I have yet to see a killer feature that would move me away from mutt---or an incompatibility of mutt that causes enough of a problem to switch.

I was fortunate enough to pass through Brattleboro once and I have to agree, it is a beautiful charming little town. I would love to go back sometime.

I've been using mutt as my only email client for over 10 years now. You are right that a lot of emails are HTML only, but you can use something like w3m or lynx to render the HTML inside of mutt, and it is pretty rare that images in emails actually matter. (Mostly they are company logos or other non-useful crap...)

And even better: You avoid loading any external resources, which both avoids the data leak, and prevents the sender from modifying the content of the received email.

Gmail relatively recently changed to intercept images and cache them all for you, preventing the leak. But then, this is Google we’re talking about. I’m sure there’s still a leak, maybe via AMP for Email. (Of course, hyperlinks are also often used for tracking.)

Only images? So, fonts can still be used to leak and manipulate?

Well, no, custom web fonts generally aren’t supported by email clients, email within Gmail is sanitized by default.

And I stand slightly corrected: by customizing email image URLs, you can apparently track the first open, but not user details (IP address, device, subsequent opens, etc.) https://customer.io/blog/gmail-loading-images.html

When I use the web mail I always keep images off anyway.