I've never had to use a maillist patch myself, but from the ones that I've glanced at, I have this same problem, that formatting, syntax highlighting is absent.

I've never had to use a maillist patch myself, but from the ones that I've glanced at, I have this same problem, that formatting, syntax highlighting is absent. It seems like this would be an easy problem to fix by using a better viewer, so that might be enough to make it comprehensible.