A considerate friend informed me recently that emails I send (with Neomutt; could be Mutt or Gnus or Pine) look funny on his device:
Apparently Google doesn't invest much effort in properly formatting standard RFC 2822 text emails.
Given that Gmail has more than one billion monthly active users, it seems futile to blame them for the problem.
Is there something that I can do on my end to make my emails appear "normal"? I'm happy to use format=flowed which has somewhat unofficial support in Emacs; but apparently Gmail does not support it.
Another solution that comes to mind would be to pass my plain-text emails through some kind of Markdown parser, turning them into HTML and attaching this as an alternative format to outgoing emails. I haven't really thought this through, but it seems like it could work nicely because Markdown already supports
quoted text
and double-quoted text
using the standard >, >> prefixes. Perhaps the result would look even better than the emails that "normal" people send using their graphical email clients.
Do people do this? Can they do this (e.g. in Mutt/Neomutt)? What is the "standard" solution?
Best Answer
check out 'plainMail2HTML' which uses python's docutils to convert 'markdown' to 'HTML'. So far I've found the results to be encouraging. Find out more at the github repository.
Bye bye