Migration : Dealing with Outlook users

[Grant Edwards]

On 2019-09-07, Italo Penna <ivspenna at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm a UNIX user trying to move from a GUI email ( Thunderbird ) to mutt. 
> However most of company employers are MS Outlook users and, as expected, 
> all them send html emails with tons of awkward stuff like tables, 
> in-line images and meetings appointments .

Good luck.  I did that for decades, but have finally given up since we
no longer have IMAP/SMTP enabled on the Exchange server.

> I'm using vim as editor and a markdown parser ( pandoc ) via macro to 
> compose HTML mail to them ...

For several years, I used "muttdown" to compose multipart-alternative
plaintext and html messages and was quite happy with it.  FWIW, my
personal branch is here:

  https://github.com/GrantEdwards/muttdown

> which works great ( except for in-line images, yet ) for composing, but 
> when replying someone including the sender message at the body of my 
> mail, the things becomes a real mess...

Most of the time replying worked fine.  Muttdown knows what to do with
the ">" indentation that mutt produces. Replies did often require some
re-arranging, re-quoting and a _lot_ of trimming to produce a reply
that was readable and looked competent and professional.  [OTOH, it's
been decades since I've seen anybody else at work reply to an e-mail
in a manner that I would deem even remotely professional.]

Now that "they" have shut off IMAP/SMTP access to the Exchange server,
my days of using mutt for work are over.  Now I use Hiri and OWA
webmail.  They're both pretty awful in various differing ways.

I still try to trim and respond in-line, but it's not always possible.

Doing things in mutt was a _lot_ quicker and more efficient.

I would guess I spend 3X-4X more time dealing with e-mail after being
forced to give up mutt.

I handled reading e-mails by setting up my mailcap file to use
combination of w3m/links/links for inline rendering and
firefox/mozilla when I hit 'p'.

--
Grant