Creating HTML emails with mutt

[Grant Edwards]

On 2019-11-01, Stefan Hagen <sh+mutt at codevoid.de> wrote:
>
>> <https://muttmua.gitlab.io/mutt/manual-dev.html#alternative-order>.
>
> This is interesting - I'm trying this...
>
> I'm using this MIMEBellish script to transform plaintext mail to
> multipart mail with HTML for a few years and it works quite well:
> http://nosubstance.me/post/mutt-secret-sauce/
>
> Personally, I find the change from text as WYSIWYG representation to
> text as source code (markdown is source code in a way) challenging.
> While I was able to just write an email and send it, it is now a process
> of carefully "coding" an email, previewing, correcting, previewing,
> sending...

That is indeed the tradeoff.  The reward is that you get nice quoting,
lists, code-blocks, italics, bold, etc.  The cost is that it's more
work.  It's simpler to just create an HTML part by taking the
text/plain (with appropriate escaping) and shoving it inside
<pre></pre>tags with trivial amount of CSS to pick a fixed font.  The
drawback to that is that paragraphs are not "flowable" by the renderer
and it looks like crap on narrow display (e.g. phones).

Another benifit to the markup-language apparoach is that for some
reason I find that when proof-reading something in a different
"format" I spot more errors than I do when proof-reading the "source"
as I typed it. I remember the same being true from my days using
TeX/LaTeX.  But that might just be me...

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