[conspire] HTML-only e-mail

[Ruben Safir]

> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable 
> 
> Now, quoted-printable is, IMO, a pretty awful thing to do to text, and
> I wish it would go away, but any decent MUA's mailcap entries or
> equivalent should be able to make it readable.
>

For whatever its worth, I'm just using mutt in vim.  The new distros
are bloated with internationization.  I don't know if this is directly
related.  I just removed a few megs of chinese and Korean library
files from my ASUS EEE because it has a tight hard drive space.

 
> More to the immediate point, it's pretty easy to do likewise with
> pure-HTML postings:  You just need a suitable /etc/mailcap or ~/.mailcap
> entry.  (Some MUAs, including mutt, which I use, consult mailcap.
> Others use internal rulesets, or whatever.)  
> 
> Here is what I have in /home/rick/.mailcap that handles pure-HTML mail:
> 
> text/html; /usr/bin/lynx -dump -force_html '%s'; copiousoutput; description=HTML Text; nametemplate=%s.html
> 

I have this in the /etc/mailcap

text/html; w3m -dump %s; copiousoutput; nametemplate=%s.html

It still is not fun because I have to go into the view mode and the 
reply doesn't translate.  I'm really not certain why people insist on
HTML, but recruiters are terrible about this.

> I'm sure something better isn't difficult to make, but that's what I
> came up with a number of years ago, and it's been good enough for me.
> As a result, I was (barely) able to notice that Adrien was posting in
> pure-HTML, because of some characteristing indenting from lynx's -dump
> mode, but otherwise it wasn't annoying.
> 
> One slightly broader point that I'm attempting to drive towards, with
> that example:  Our core competency as Linux users is supposed to be our
> control of our software environments -- and it turns out that a very
> large part of the careless badness on the Internet, including pure-HTML
> e-mail, cruddy Javasscript and Flash advertising, etc., can with not
> much effort get rearranged, rewritten, or filtered out on the fly at
> _your_ receiving end, 

Question:  How can one remove all the non-ASCI chars in VI on one fell swoop?

> to make it standards-compliant and non-annoying.
> I'd like to suggest that it's smarter to just autoconvert pure-HTML to
> plaintext than it is to continually ask people not to post it, and also
> a lot more likely to succeed.

He was more annoyed with my spelling.  I'm not a fan of aspell.  Its a very old
argument which is better googled.  I don't want to argue over spelling. 



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Ruben
-- 
http://www.mrbrklyn.com - Interesting Stuff
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software

"The tremendous problem we face is that we are becoming sharecroppers to our own cultural heritage -- we need the ability to participate in our own society."

"> I'm an engineer. I choose the best tool for the job, politics be damned.<
You must be a stupid engineer then, because politcs and technology have been attached at the hip since the 1st dynasty in Ancient Egypt.  I guess you missed that one."

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