So, I guess people really do use html mail now. I'm a little sad, but not surprised. I do find it a little bit ironic converting markdown (a format for structured plain text, allowing for easy quoting, in-line replies etc) to html.
That aside, I can understand the frustration with web interfaces, and if committed to using gmail, why not have a nice interface for composing mails at least?
My current pet peeve with google interfaces, are the text-editing boxes on g+ -- which are not text-boxes, and so doesn't work with "it's all text" -- and also breaks cut'n'paste for long sections of text. So I end up editing a text-file in vim, then copying section by section in ordert to post into g+ communities. Sigh.
I dislike that email, which predates the web, adopted html. And quite frustrated that many clients do not attach an equivalent plain text version of the email.
I thought this would be a problem, but frankly piping in everything into w3m makes it surprisingly easy to stay plain text only if desired.
The patched version of It's All Text! mentioned in the submitted blog post let's you edit the non-textarea textboxes on Google+.
(The blog post mentions my patch, but it was actually Github user patjak who got IAT! working with non-textareas, all I did was remove a bit of patjak's code to make the HTML passthrough unmodified to the editor.)
This tool involves switching to Emacs to compose a message body, while doing all of your mail interactions with the web interface. Once composing is done, the content is sent to the browser. Optionally, you can write in markdown, processing that before the hand-off back to the browser.
It would be possible to eliminate the back-and-forth jumping, just doing everything in Emacs, using the recently-announced Gmail API[1]. To the author, is this something you've considered doing? I'd use something like that.
This actually sounds nice and not too difficult. Thanks for pointing it out. Unfortunately, I barely have time to improve my existing packages anymore, let alone create new ones.
So yes, it is something I've considered, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
I have been using "Gmail old compose"[1] together with
"It's all text" / "Edit with Emacs" to achieve the
same effect. With the old compose, there's no need to
convert to/from HTML: email body is just text.
I suggest you take a look at sup (http://supmua.org/). Its goal is to transpose the gmail experience on your terminal.
I've been working with the maildirroot branch [0] which mimics the IMAP installation of GMail, so you can use a standard OfflineIMAP to sync between your computer and GMail, and still use all the power of tagging/archiving/searching on your computer.
Oh and it has a few niceties, the most important one to me being native support of gpg.
Gmail's implementation of IMAP is quite broken (and the XMPP/Jabber one too!).
But you can achieve a local setup which rivals with Gmail by combining mutt and/or notmuch/mu and isync (mbsync). And it's quite possible to keep it sync'ed with Gmail, although there might be some rough edges.
Personally, I don't thing tags are that useful if you have a fast and expressive local search engine like notmuch or mu (xapian-based), but YMMV.
I still use MH-E + nmh in Emacs on Linux, and I had phantasies of using it with IMAP and the GNU version of nmh, but I've never really seen someone say it works. Anyone?
[+] [-] e12e|11 years ago|reply
That aside, I can understand the frustration with web interfaces, and if committed to using gmail, why not have a nice interface for composing mails at least?
My current pet peeve with google interfaces, are the text-editing boxes on g+ -- which are not text-boxes, and so doesn't work with "it's all text" -- and also breaks cut'n'paste for long sections of text. So I end up editing a text-file in vim, then copying section by section in ordert to post into g+ communities. Sigh.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/
[+] [-] nextos|11 years ago|reply
I thought this would be a problem, but frankly piping in everything into w3m makes it surprisingly easy to stay plain text only if desired.
[+] [-] omaranto|11 years ago|reply
(The blog post mentions my patch, but it was actually Github user patjak who got IAT! working with non-textareas, all I did was remove a bit of patjak's code to make the HTML passthrough unmodified to the editor.)
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] neonkiwi|11 years ago|reply
It would be possible to eliminate the back-and-forth jumping, just doing everything in Emacs, using the recently-announced Gmail API[1]. To the author, is this something you've considered doing? I'd use something like that.
[1] https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/
[+] [-] BruceConnor|11 years ago|reply
So yes, it is something I've considered, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
[+] [-] dang|11 years ago|reply
Me too. Sounds like a great side project for somebody.
[+] [-] HerrMonnezza|11 years ago|reply
[1]: http://home.oldcompose.com/
[+] [-] davidw|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arohner|11 years ago|reply
I'm still really interested in a full mail client that supports all of gmail's features (labels, archiving, etc), and works well with Emacs.
[+] [-] rakoo|11 years ago|reply
I've been working with the maildirroot branch [0] which mimics the IMAP installation of GMail, so you can use a standard OfflineIMAP to sync between your computer and GMail, and still use all the power of tagging/archiving/searching on your computer.
Oh and it has a few niceties, the most important one to me being native support of gpg.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the maintainers.
[0] https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/tree/maildir-root
[+] [-] nextos|11 years ago|reply
But you can achieve a local setup which rivals with Gmail by combining mutt and/or notmuch/mu and isync (mbsync). And it's quite possible to keep it sync'ed with Gmail, although there might be some rough edges.
Personally, I don't thing tags are that useful if you have a fast and expressive local search engine like notmuch or mu (xapian-based), but YMMV.
[+] [-] stevenrace|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ams6110|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e40|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nextos|11 years ago|reply
It's a tiny C utility written by the mutt creator, Theodore Tso and others, so it's very good as expected.
[+] [-] jfb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baldfat|11 years ago|reply