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HTML mails - forwarding and inline commenting

#1291

Hi Benny,

the current handling of HTML mails something where I'd like to get some feedback on your plans for better HTML-mail editing, as this is the only real issue for me for my daily tasks (requiring me to switch sometimes to Mail.app). For everything else MailMate has done the job pretty well or even better than Mail.app!

One problem in a typical business scenario is that I get mails by people only writing HTML mails (Outlook is one of the mail clients to blame here) with discussions happening "inline". I currently see no way to enter into a multidimensional discussion using MailMate but can only comment, while the rest of the mail is no longer formatted, e.g. tables are gone or exploded etc. I have the impression that some people even use Word to write mails. The problem starts typical with a click on 'reply' - then the formatting is already gone.

A similar case is the forwarding of mails. Sometimes I receive some newsletters or some other HTML-formatted mail I'd like to forward to some colleagues. The typical case here is to add a 'fyi' to the top of the mail, sometimes to highlight a key word. I currently don't know how to handle such cases than using Mail.app.

I've seen that you had recently a beta available for HTML mails, and I already tried out parts of it for formatted math, but of course I'm curious when you will have a beta available with the HTML feature that you announced. I have the impression this could solve already many of the issues when one has to live with the HTML mails from others that need to be resent (either as a reply or for forwarding).

A different approach is of course to have a real HTML editor in MailMate, i.e. the same widget that Mail.app uses, as this would allow also native inline editing. I'd however prefer if it were only an alternative to the current plain text and Markdown editors. It also wouldn't need a preview window as it is already wysiwyg (same applies for the current plain text editor, btw - not sure why there's also a preview as it is just a different font ...) ).

A third one is to rely on a HTML to Markdown converter to break up the HTML and continue fully in Markdown, including inline editing.

Cheers,
- Stefan

Reported by Stefan Doehla · October 21st, 2015 @ 11:19 AM

State: new
Milestone: none
Assigned to: benny benny

Activity

  1. benny
    benny
    • State changed from new to accepted

    HTML to Markdown doesn't work reliably since HTML is a (huge) superset of Markdown.

    As you have already seen I do have a solution in the works. I'm thinking weeks or a few months before you can use it, but I should always be careful with time frames. (El Capitan issues delayed my plans.) It'll work at least as well as an HTML editor except for the fact that you cannot edit the HTML. Usually, when you do want to edit the HTML then you don't need the HTML (and it can then easily be converted to plain text). I can see that highlighting a word is a special case though.

    There are other tickets on this subject, but this one describes the issue very precisely. I'll update it when there is any progress.

    October 21st, 2015 @ 12:04 PM

  2. benny
    benny
    • State changed from accepted to fixreleased

    September 16th, 2016 @ 06:05 PM

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