[UFO Chicago] Elm Is Not Pine

[Jordan Bettis]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 06:42:43PM -0600, Jay F Shachter wrote:
> Elm does everything I need it to do.  I am satisfied with it.
> Therefore, I have no reason to move to mutt, or pine.  For similar
> reasons, a man does not replace his wife as soon as he learns that
> better women exist.

The difference being that your mail client won't take half of what's
yours on the way out.

> For example, I have written a
> feature into elm that rewrites subject headers when replying to a
> message, so that if you send me a message with the subject "I think,
> therefore I am", and I type the r key to compose a reply, elm
> constructs the header "Re: you think, therefore you are".

You got a patent on that? I think you've got yourself a million dollar
idea there.

> My only complaint is that the world changes in ways that I
> cannot predict, and have not approved, sometimes rendering my working
> environment inadequate.  For example, people are now sending me mail
> in HTML format, even when their messages do not require the
> annotations of a markup language, so I am tasked with writing Emacs
> macros that remove all of the HTML tags and idioms, leaving me with a
> readable message in plain text.  This is not my fault, though; it is
> the fault of the world, which fails to behave in accordance with my
> wishes.

I'd recommend using either lynx -dump or html2text to strip HTML, as
they parse the html first and can generally do a far better job of it
than any regex stripper. Back when I used gnus I had it automatically
running lynx -dump. I had to force uninstall of w3c otherwise it would
use that and then helpfully render the web bugs (God I hate gnus). You
can make mutt do the same thing with lynx (it's in the FAQ) but I
haven't had to set it up yet because most people who send me HTML
nowdays use the multipart/alternative method.

-- 
Jordan Bettis -- Chicago Il.