Optionally send plaintext emails
Problem
Organizations want to send only plaintext emails (instead of HTML), due to security/spam concerns, disk space, and other enterprise-wide IT policies. (Read the comment thread for further discussion.)
Scope
- This feature adds a global configuration option to the GitLab instance to send plaintext emails only or HTML emails only. (The system already has plaintext versions of existing emails.) This applies to all emails, not only notification emails.
- The default option is to still send HTML emails.
Out of scope
- As part of this issue, we will do some basic verification to document missing or incorrect plaintext emails. We will log any problems as fixes in new issues. But those are not in scope for this issue itself.
- There are other use cases for setting plaintext vs HTML at an individual level. That is not within the scope of this particular issue.
Original description
It would be awesome if there were an option to send plaintext commit messages rather than the multi-part/mixed emails that are currently sent. My team is used to plaintext messages from git-notifier, and the explosion of size of emails (300k with gitlab vs 8k with git-notifier) is causing some angst with my developers. I see two places where an option like this would be useful: as a personal preference (send me all mails in plaintext only) and with the "emails on push" service (specify to send plaintext-only mails). Given it's the HTML mail that causes the large email size I doubt there's a point in having "HTML-only mails".
The reason I suggest having this option for the service is that we send commit mails to a mailing lis that most folks are subscribed to, so if we can only send plaintext mails to that mailing list, that would be a really nice feature to have.