[RFC PATCH 0/3] Quoting HTML-only emails in replies

Subject: [RFC PATCH 0/3] Quoting HTML-only emails in replies

Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:40:38 -0700

To: notmuch@notmuchmail.org, awg@xvx.ca

Cc:

From: Adam Wolfe Gordon

Hi everyone,

I use notmuch at work, where the email server is Exchange and the majority
of my colleagues use Outlook. This means that I get a fair bit of
HTML-only email. When using notmuch reply to create replies to such
emails, the quoted body ends up containing only the line "Non-text part:
text/html", and if I want to quote them I have to do it manually.

This series of patches fixes this issue. It adds a --format=html option to
notmuch reply, which acts like --format=default except that it includes
HTML parts as well as text parts. The emacs interface render the quoted
HTML into text using w3m. I've added a customize option,
notmuch-mua-quote-html-parts to control this behavior. I've included a
test for the notmuch reply part, though it's not a great one.

This code is working well for me, but I'm marking this as RFC because
there are a few things that could be better:

1. If an email has a text part and an HTML part they'll both end up
   quoted, and emacs might make the text part look ugly by trying to
   render it as HTML.  Ideally it should omit HTML parts from the reply
   when a text part exists, but it looks like this would take some
   non-trivial refactoring of the notmuch reply code.

2. The easiest way to implement --format=html in notmuch reply was to use
   a global variable controlling HTML output, which feels clumsy to me.
   Perhaps someone who is more familiar with the notmuch code can suggest
   a cleaner way of doing it.

3. As I mentioned, the test I've included isn't great.  A test that uses
   an HTML-only email would be nice, and if (1) can be resolved, then the
   existing test will have different results.

I hope someone else will find these changes useful - please do let me know
if you have suggestions.

Cheers.

Adam Wolfe Gordon (3):
  test: replies that quote HTML parts (expected to fail)
  reply: New format 'html' that quotes text/html parts
  emacs: Optionally quote HTML parts when replying.

 emacs/notmuch-mua.el |   23 +++++++++++++++++++++++
 notmuch-reply.c      |    8 +++++++-
 notmuch.c            |    6 +++++-
 test/multipart       |   24 ++++++++++++++++++++++++
 4 files changed, 59 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

-- 
1.7.5.4

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