3 ms·

Emacs does have its own renderer, eww, that can be used to do simple HTML rendering of emails. If I'm sent something really gruesome, "K H" will send it to Fire

by girzel 6y ago

Emacs does have its own renderer, eww, that can be used to do simple HTML rendering of emails. If I'm sent something really gruesome, "K H" will send it to Firefox to display. In my experience, the mails that refuse to display anything but "please view this message in your browser" are never mails I actually want to look at. I'm not arguing that you have to be willing to put up with some friction! But to me it's not that bad. [edit: typo]

ylee 6y ago
I do the same, with VM; 25 years and counting. My Emacs doesn't have EWW but W3M is sufficient for almost all HTML messages; for me shift-H is the keybinding that sends a message to the browser should I want to view it that way. I love being able to write my own Elisp code to have VM work exactly the way I want it.
jacobsenscott 6y ago
I use mu4e and a lot of what the author says is spot on. Searching email with mu is super fantastic for example. Viewing html email in emacs is usually pretty easy. The html2text is usually good enough. The real problem is sending email. Plain text email looks like trash in any modern mail reader. Any recipient will wonder why your email is broken. On a desktop client the lines will be way too short. On a phone, too long. Format flowed or whatever doesn't solve it. The lines just need to be html paragraphs. I saw a blog post about an mu4e plugin that would allow you to write your email in markdown, and it will htmlify it for you. That would be a big help, assuming you can preview before sending. It is easy to make markdown errors without a preview.
- ylee 6y ago
  >The real problem is sending email. Plain text email looks like trash in any modern mail reader. Any recipient will wonder why your email is broken. On a desktop client the lines will be way too short. On a phone, too long. I disagree on "too short" lines being a problem for desktop, but in any case, it is quite possible to send plaintext mail without 70-column line breaks. How I do so in VM in Emacs: https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/viewmail-info/2020-05/msg00000.html https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/viewmail-info/2020-05/... I've had to stop 25 years of muscle memory of M-q while writing a message, but otherwise the solution seems quite satisfactory.
- nanna 6y ago
  > I saw a blog post about an mu4e plugin that would allow you to write your email in markdown, and it will htmlify it for you. Perhaps this? https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/g6ujzs/sending_richtext_emails_from_emacs_with_markdown/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/g6ujzs/sending_richt... Would be wonderful if this was incorporated into mu4e. As for html2text, there's also the Python-based html2markdown, which I prefer. mu4e-html2text-command "html2markdown | grep -v '&nbsp_place_holder;'"

by girzel 6y ago

ylee 6y ago

I do the same, with VM; 25 years and counting. My Emacs doesn't have EWW but W3M is sufficient for almost all HTML messages; for me shift-H is the keybinding that sends a message to the browser should I want to view it that way. I love being able to write my own Elisp code to have VM work exactly the way I want it.

jacobsenscott 6y ago

I use mu4e and a lot of what the author says is spot on. Searching email with mu is super fantastic for example. Viewing html email in emacs is usually pretty easy. The html2text is usually good enough. The real problem is sending email. Plain text email looks like trash in any modern mail reader. Any recipient will wonder why your email is broken. On a desktop client the lines will be way too short. On a phone, too long. Format flowed or whatever doesn't solve it. The lines just need to be html paragraphs. I saw a blog post about an mu4e plugin that would allow you to write your email in markdown, and it will htmlify it for you. That would be a big help, assuming you can preview before sending. It is easy to make markdown errors without a preview.

ylee 6y ago
>The real problem is sending email. Plain text email looks like trash in any modern mail reader. Any recipient will wonder why your email is broken. On a desktop client the lines will be way too short. On a phone, too long. I disagree on "too short" lines being a problem for desktop, but in any case, it is quite possible to send plaintext mail without 70-column line breaks. How I do so in VM in Emacs: https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/viewmail-info/2020-05/msg00000.html https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/viewmail-info/2020-05/... I've had to stop 25 years of muscle memory of M-q while writing a message, but otherwise the solution seems quite satisfactory.
nanna 6y ago
> I saw a blog post about an mu4e plugin that would allow you to write your email in markdown, and it will htmlify it for you. Perhaps this? https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/g6ujzs/sending_richtext_emails_from_emacs_with_markdown/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/g6ujzs/sending_richt... Would be wonderful if this was incorporated into mu4e. As for html2text, there's also the Python-based html2markdown, which I prefer. mu4e-html2text-command "html2markdown | grep -v '&nbsp_place_holder;'"