Attached is a number of test email sends from either gmail or yahoo
web email clients to a host with my nmh mail client. None of these
tests involve replying. The issue is apparent in the received email
body.
Alright, so, I took a look at these ... as far as I can tell, unless
something in your mail delivery path is rewriting these mesages (and
I think that is unlikely), this is not anything nmh is doing. Here's
my best guess as to what is happening.
Drilling down into the actual MIME content, both messages are in
multipart/alternative format, with a text/plain content and text/html
content.
The gmail message has the text/plain content nicely wrapped as
recommended by the RFCs, with no line longer than 78 characters. So
that all seems fine.
The yahoo one, however, is all one long line glued together with a
content-transfer-encoding type of quoted-printable. But ... the HTML has
paragraph breaks in it just fine.
What I think is happening is both Gmail and Yahoo are creating
native-format HTML emails on their client, and then their mail clients
are using the HTML to also generate an alternative text/plain content.
And it so happens that whatever converter yahoo is using sucks (I am
on a mailing list hosted by yahoo, and their mail software does the
incredibly amazingly stupid thing of taking text/plain emails I send and
converting them to HTML, so this level of brokenness doesn't surprise
me). So, I don't think this is necessarily a nmh problem, like I said.
From a practical standpoint, you're probably one of the few people who
actually USES the text/plain content instead of the text/html content.
So, solutions? Well, you could use the text/html content like the rest
of the world; I ran the test message you provided through my copy of
nmh (which is configured to use w3m to convert text/html content) and
it displayed paragraph breaks just fine. For replies I use replyfilter
which also uses w3m to convert text/html content, which also works well.
You might be able to configure the yahoo/gmail clients to generate
native text/plain parts, but I suspect that will be an uphill battle
since you'd have to convince all of your correspondants to make that
change. You might be able to convince Yahoo to fix their busted-ass
HTML to text/plain converter, but I suspect they wouldn't care (I would
wonder why the bother to generate a text/plain part AT ALL if it's all
broken, but they didn't ask me).
--Ken
--
nmh-workers
https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers