Re: Mail layout and fonts

[Elias Mårtenson]

On 15 April 2015 at 19:35, invalid <address@is.invalid> wrote:

On 2015-04-15, Elias M??rtenson <lokedhs@gmail.com> wrote:
> I disagree. Sometimes you are working in an organisation where Outlook is
> the main means of communication. If so, you need to (unfortunately) post
> messages that conforms to this style. This includes including the entire
> email chain below your message, as well as your own messages being HTML
> formatted.

That seems a little extreme. Just because other people are Windows victims
doesn't mean you have to stoop to their level.

Indeed. It not only seems extreme, it _is_ extreme. However, in certain industries this is pretty much required. The alternative is to run Outlook or Evolution or some other email application that can handle it.

 

I've been working in IT since it was called DP and before there were things
like email or HTML. Since the first sad day HTML was used in email I have
never had anybody complain about me responding to HTML email with a text
email. If I had to guess I would bet this is because the people who use HTML
emailers are too dumb to have any idea what they're doing and are also
incapable of detecting whether some piece of mail they get is in ASCII text
form or not.

I welcome you to work in the banking industry for a while. If you do this there you will likely be accused of trying to hide the history since looking down at the email chain (which is pretty much guaranteed to contain tens of images, mostly screenshots of the things people talk about) is the only way people can get an understanding of what is being discussed. Messages are full of references to messages further down in the chain. When a new person is briefed on a case they get a copy of the last email in the chain with a comment "Please read this to get up to date on the current issue".

Like it or not, this is how people work in these industries and if you're able to avoid it, great. That means that you are lucky enough to not need what I built. I certainly wish that I didn't have to use it myself, but it's either that or not use Gnus. I choose the latter.

 

> I wrote an entire package to do this; formatting the emails using
> emacs-muse, and rewriting the DOM of the email chain. In case anyone is
> interested, here's the code: https://github.com/lokedhs/gnus-outlook-style
>
> It takes a bit of an effort to get to run properly, mainly because Emacs
> does not have a HTML parser so I need to call out to an external program
> for that. I'll be happy to provide advice for anyone that wants to try it
> though.

What an enormous waste of time and possibly talent...

True, I have spent far too many hours tuning this thing, including adding special hacks around the HTML generation to make sure the output looks good in Outlook (the HTML renderer in Outlook is based on IE6, I believe).

That said, compared to the amount of time I would have wasted having had to use a different email client, it's definitely worth it.

 

Regards,

Elias