[WBEL-users] html email in whitebox list

[Kirby Bohling]

On Sat, Jul 31, 2004 at 06:13:53PM +0200, Jan-Albert van Ree wrote:
> On Saturday 31 July 2004 04:46, Daniel J. Summers wrote:
> 
> > I doubt you'll offend anyone with your request.  You make not get
> > compliance either.  ;)  For me, it takes some remembering to go up and
> > switch that "HTML" setting to "Plain Text" when I'm dealing with a
> > mailing list.  It's easy in newsgroups, because I tell it to use plain
> > text for everything there.
> > I like using HTML mail, personally.  (Besides, my sig block probably
> > looks like crap in plain text...)  I know there are people who are
> > rabidly opposed to it, and I find it really ironic that they're usually
> > really smart folks.  Heck, if you're smart enough to get Linux going...  :)
> 
> Nothing to do with "smart" but some people (like me) sometimes are "stuck" 
> using the console or just prefer a console-based mail app such as elm, mutt 
> or pine. Not sure about pine, but elm and mutt are terrible at handling HTML 
> so it simply makes our life more difficult.
> 
> For me it's gotten to a point where I'm seriously considering having procmail 
> delete all email that's in HTML. Anybody here any experience with that?

Jan,

	If you really want to strip all HTML, you might look into
writting a perl script that uses the MIME perl tools.  Mimedefang
uses them, in fact, I'll bet you could configure MimeDefang to strip
all HTML attachments, and kill all HTML-only e-mail.  It's my
understanding that MimeDefang uses the sendmail milter interface
now, but I believe you can insert it with a custom configuration
into your procmail scripts.

<my personal views>
	I use mutt, it has two useful features, I use it even in a GUI
environment, because I've found that it's superior to everything
else in terms of machine resources vs. usefulness.  If I had to use
a GUI one, I'd highly recommend Evolution but it eats memory like
crazy.  

First using this directive in my .muttrc:

alternative_order text/enriched text/plain text/html

	So as long as they include both the HTML and plain-text versions
you can view plain text.  I'm well aware that some people don't like
the wasted bandwidth and storage.  You can strip the HTML version
out, but it's still a bandwidth waster at that point.  However, I
don't see that as a problem (I live in the U.S. with non-metered
broadband, it's my understanding that in other areas, those extra
bytes can add up to real money).

Second:

	You can pipe anything thru a filter.  There are several
filtering programs out there that strip well known signatures
(Yahoo, HotMail, etc.).  Presumable, there is a program out there
that can take HTML on standard in and output non-HTML on standard
out.   I'd be nearly shocked if someone hasn't written such a beast
for use with Mutt.  If nothing else, you can probably pipe it into
w3m, links, or lynx, all of which allow viewing of HTML e-mail.

Given that I don't need it, I can't vouch for them, but this site
looks relatively useful (specifically, the "Plain text and setext"
section):

http://www.w3.org/Tools/html2things.html
</my personal views>

	Thanks,
		Kirby