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Handling received HTML body in replies

#1061

Just wanted to say, awesome client! Does pretty much everything I could want. One thing that does make the client a bit harder to use is the fact that any email received that is HTML is not handled when I reply to the sender/all. When I reply/forward, the quoted body displays all the HTML tags rather than stripping them or rendering them. When I send the message to someone, they see the quoted body as HTML rather than something readable.

I have solved this problem by writing a Mac mouse service to strip the HTML from the message (i.e., using w3m, screenshot attached). This is a bit tedious, but works. Do you think it would be possible to add a hidden preference to enable a quick/easy strip of HTML in reply/forward bodies?

Reported by Roy Crowder · February 27th, 2015 @ 03:50 PM

State: accepted
Milestone: none
Assigned to: benny benny

Activity

  1. benny
    benny
    • State changed from new to accepted

    Ideally, this is how MailMate is supposed to work:

    • If a plain text body part exists in the email (it should) then that is used for forwarding/replying.
    • If no plain text body part exists then the HTML body part is converted to plain text (Markdown).

    In practice, it doesn't always work since some HTML messages are hard to convert and, especially for forwarding, MailMate some times gives up. I'm pretty sure there are also some bugs lurking, but I'm postponing looking into it until I can, hopefully soon, switch to this strategy:

    • Prefer plain text when possible.
    • When HTML is needed or the user explicitly requests HTML then the received HTML is inserted into the reply/forwarded message similar to how MailMate handles HTML signatures. The HTML is also converted to plain text for the plain text body part. The end result is essentially the same as seen with email clients with HTML editors except that I don't allow editing the forwarded/replied HTML.

    It is, of course, not as simple as that, but it's a relatively high priority to allow the user to handle HTML in a way that the correspondent does not notice that MailMate is mainly a plain text email client.

    There are various tickets touching various aspects of this issue, but I'll keep this one open as well until a solution exists :-)

    (I didn't know w3m.)

    February 27th, 2015 @ 04:43 PM

  2. Roy Crowder
    Roy Crowder

    w3m and links are pretty common and is generally what mutt and alpine use to handle HTML. It generally works pretty well.

    February 27th, 2015 @ 05:32 PM

  3. benny
    benny
    • State changed from accepted to fixreleased

    A solution very similar to what I describe above has now been implemented (and released).

    September 16th, 2016 @ 06:11 PM

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