Wo! There's a whole section of the conversation that ended up in "Untidy" that
shouldn't've.
On 9 Sep 2012, at 20:25, John Levine <johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com> wrote:
I have to say that I'm baffled at the perverse pride that people seem
to take in being so technically backward that they're unable to handle
the mail that 99% of the world uses today. While not being a fan of
overdecorated HTML and endless font changes, and strongly preferring a
mail program that lets me keep my fingers on the keyboard, I can deal
with it. (I use Alpine, keep meaning to take another look at mutt.)
This sort of modernist attitude only really works while you're not recovering
mail from mbox files using less. Or, in general, while you need to do as
little work as possible to redisplay or process a message. Not to say you're
point isn't essentially valid--we must, of course, be aware of the current
trends--but popularity doesn't mean correct for the group of people genuinely
preferring low-overhead or "Technically backward" MUAs, pagers, scripts, etc.
Those people got there first and have a pretty good leverage for screaming at
other people who got there later, and failed to regard those others not like
themselves by flagrantly ignoring standards which would have guaranteed
interoperability had they not done so, particularly when the primary motivation
for doing so is ease of implementation with a fundamentally different UI
paradigm.
Keep using alpine. Move to mutt and you'll get pretty plus-signs in the left
column of wrapped mail--that is, unless mutt has also worked around this type
of breakage (doubtful, they're a pretty puritanical bunch :-) ). But mutt has
maildir+ support where alpine doesn't without a load of controversial patching,
and so while I'm using alpine now it's only because I go through Dovecot as
intermediary or use external IMAP servers. (Yes, free email providers accessed
through IMAP/SMTP in textmode as opposed to /usr/sbin/sendmail are cool when
they come from Apple. They're … all shiny. :-) )
For the large majority of mail that is written in paragraphs rather
than tables, line wrapping is a useful feature, regardless of the
character set, particularly for those of us who sometimes read our
mail on a tablet or phone while changing planes. For mail that is a
table and stuff has to line up in columns, use HTML tables. That's
what they're for.
And Format=Flowed takes care of the first requirement. Multipart/alternative
takes care of the latter (when inventive multi-line columns will not suffice)
(and they don't, with small-screen devices).
PS: Yes, this is top posted. You can deal with that, too.
This message bottom-posted for your reading convenience, as opposed to my
laziness. It'll render beautifully in alpine, I'm sure. :-)
Cheers,
Sabahattin