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Gmail Threading

#971

When I send emails as part of a long thread in Gmail, they often screw up the formatting as seen here

I love MailMate, but I work in an organization that uses Gmail and sends a bunch of emails. I paid for version 2.0 of MailMate, but I'm frustrated that I can't use it because of this issue. Is there a setting I can select to help mitigate this?

Reported by Ryan Merrill · November 18th, 2014 @ 03:41 PM

State: accepted
Milestone: none
Assigned to: benny benny

Activity

  1. benny
    benny
    • State changed from new to accepted

    The problem is the lack of vertical quote lines and maybe too much indentation? Or is it more than that?

    Do you use Markdown in MailMate?

    MailMate tries to do as little as possible when generating HTML (based on Markdown) in order to leave it up to the receiving email client to decide how quoted segments (and more) is displayed. This might be an example where it would be better if MailMate forced a particular style on the recipient (sigh). I've seen another example, with Outlook webmail, where the default font is the browser default font when using HTML without a specific font specified. This looks ugly because plain text emails are displayed using a different font. Yet another example of HTML basically being a broken concept for emails...

    If my assumptions above are correct then there are two possible solutions:

    • MailMate uses the received HTML verbatim when generating a reply (which is going to be uneditable).
    • MailMate generates styled HTML explicitly setting indentation and quoting style.

    For various reasons I have both of these planned. I cannot give you a time frame and I cannot make any promises as to how well it is going to work. There is a lot of unknown variables when handling HTML in emails.

    December 3rd, 2014 @ 08:12 AM

  2. Ryan Merrill
    Ryan Merrill

    Yeah, I use markdown in MailMate. Would you recommend not using it to see if it continues to cause the issue?

    December 3rd, 2014 @ 02:20 PM

  3. benny
    benny

    Yes, if you don't use Markdown then MailMate won't generate HTML and then I cannot imagine that Gmail can display it differently than emails from other email clients.

    I'd like to emphasize that the problem is not a bug in MailMate. The problem is that each email client handles HTML in its own way (it's not standardized). In practice this means that, for example, Google probably makes sure that emails from Apple Mail or Outlook are handled nicely, but they don't care about emails from MailMate even though MailMate very likely generates much nicer HTML than the other email clients.

    The solution is that I (more or less) mimic what popular email clients do no matter how bad I think that is...

    December 3rd, 2014 @ 02:30 PM

  4. Ryan Merrill
    Ryan Merrill

    Yeah, I'm 100% sure that the problem isn't with MailMate and instead with Gmail and love the app so no harm on your part.

    I appreciate you looking into it and the feedback about how to improve things.

    December 3rd, 2014 @ 02:40 PM

  5. benny
    benny
    • State changed from accepted to fixreleased

    The solution described in my first reply to this ticket has now been implemented and released (1.9.5). I'm sorry it took that long.

    September 16th, 2016 @ 06:16 PM

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