[geeks] mail formatting (was Re: HD/IDE question)

[Michael Parson]

On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 04:37:10PM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Fri, 06 Oct 2006 @ 10:38 -0500, Michael Parson said:
>
>>> The thing that is frustrating with people doing this and also using
>>> multimedia email is that there is no real standard for any of it.
>>>
>>> The normal way of doing this is to embed HTML and use that, but that's
>>> not a valid email standard and is actually horrible for the job.
>>>
>>> The problem is that in the 15 years we've been wanting to get past plain
>>> text, *NOBODY* has come up with a sane and well-designed standard for
>>> doing anything else.
>>
>> What do you mean 'we'?  I've never wanted to get past plain-text.  But
>> I'm a Luddite, I suppose.
>
> Well, I like plain text too.  However, a lot of people like relatively
> informal email, and if they are going to do it, I would rather it be 
> done with a sane standard.

Yeah, there are definitely too many ways different programs try and do
this, unfortunately, MIME enables this, rather than fixing it.

> For one thing, done properly those of us using plain text would still be
> able to see and respond to the message.
>
>>> I've never found any that can be updated as fast as people find new ways
>>> to make simple things difficult.
>>
>> My macros are more to deal with the long-line and poor quoting problem, 
>> someone sends me html only mail, my vi macros can't deal. 
>
> I've managed to do that in vi as well, by using lynx.

Well, yeah, I have a .mailcap entry that dumps html mail to lynx-dump:

text/html; /usr/local/bin/lynx -dump -force_html %s; copiousoutput;nametemplate=%s.html

And this seems to work for nmh and mutt.

> However, I think it would be better to have mutt call lynx and pass that
> to vi.

Once it's been passed through lynx -dump, I usually don't have to do any
reformatting, unless I'm replying.  Calling lynx like that forces things
to max at 80 cols.

> Some people have done macros for this, I just haven't gotten around to
> it.
>
> Mostly I just delete HTML only email and blacklist the sender.

Sadly, not always an option :(

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org