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eftychia at 04:02pm on 2004-02-13My congressman just sent me email. (No, not personal, I think he's announcing something.) So he's got a clue about using the net to talk to constituents ... Make that half a clue. The mail is very difficult to read. It hurts my eyes badly enough not to want to bother extracting the message from the formatting by eye, and I'm annoyed enough not to want to bother piping it through Lynx to render it (because I get ticked at HTML mail (much more so when there's no plaintext version included)), but I'm feeling snarky enough to do a few search-and-replace commands in 'vi' to make it appear here the way it did on my screen when I first saw it (see previous parenthetical comment).
From: Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger <Congressman_Dutch_Ruppersberger@watchlin
x.com>
X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.4]
Subject: Greetings from Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1264" name=GENERATOR></HEAD>
<BODY>
<p><img src="http://images.watchlinx.com/150727/opm1h.gif" width="574" height="
55"></p>
<TABLE borderColor=#000000 cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=582 border=1>
<TR>
<TD align=middle><a href="http://track.watchlinx.com/_c.jpegg?cid=150727&
ln=1&urlid=1003155&kin=1352315" target="_blank"><img
height=104 alt="Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger"
src="http://images.watchlinx.com/150727/banner.jpg" width=600 border=0></
a></TD>
</TR>
<TR>
<TD class=text>
<P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><br>
<P><br>
Dear Marylander,<br>
<br>
Maryland and the whole country have turned our focus on the Democra
tic
nomination for President. With the Maryland March 2nd primary just
weeks away, I decided to invite visitors to the "Go Dutch"
website to express support for their favorite candidate and volunte
er
some information on a few issues.</P>
<P> Please take a few seconds to tell me your opinion:<br>
<a href="http://track.watchlinx.com/_c.jpegg?cid=150727&ln=1&urlid=
1003156&kin=1352315" target="_blank">http://track.watchlinx.com/_c.jpegg?cid=15
0727&ln=1&urlid=1003156&kin=1352315</a></P>
<P> Responses will be updated regularly and on-line balloting will co
ntinue<br>
through the March 2nd primary.</P>
<P> I would like to continue communicating with you by email from tim
e
to<br>
time and report on the status of my efforts in Congress and the 200
4<br>
election. </P>
<P><strong>If you would prefer not to hear from me, please <a href="htt
p://track.watchlinx.com//_r.jpegg?cid=150727&ln=1&kin=1352315&url=http%3A%2F%2F
remove.watchlinx.com%2F">click
here</a> and you will be automatically removed from our email list.</
strong></P>
<P>Feel free to pass this message along to your family, friends, and<
br>
colleagues. The more folks participate, the better informed we all
are.<br>
<br>
Sincerely,</P>
<P><img src="http://images.watchlinx.com/150727/dutchsig.gif" width="
100" height="59"><br>
Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger<br>
Maryland Second District<br>
<a href="http://track.watchlinx.com/_c.jpegg?cid=150727&ln=1&urlid=
1003155&kin=1352315" target="_blank">www.godutch.org</a></P>
<p><em><font size="2">No taxpayer funds were used in the development
or sending of this message.</font></em><br>
</p>
<table width="70%" border="1" align="center" cellpadding="5" cellspac
ing="0" bordercolor="#006600">
<tr>
<td height="44"><div align="center">
<p><font size="2"><em>Paid for and authorized by Ruppersberge
r
for Congress Committee, David C. Deger, Treasurer</em></fon
t></p>
</div></td>
</tr>
</table>
<P align="center"><font size="2"><br>
</font></P>
</BLOCKQUOTE></TD></TR></TABLE>
<p><a href="http://track.watchlinx.com//_r.jpegg?cid=150727&ln=1&kin=1352315&ur
l=http%3A%2F%2Fremove.watchlinx.com%2F"><img src="http://images.watchlinx.com/1
50727/opm1f.gif" width="602" height="148" border="0"></a></p>
<img src="http://track.watchlinx.com/_o.jpegg?cid=150727&kin=1352315&ln=1&email
=DGLENN@RADIX.NET" height="0" width="0" joking="1:1352315">
</BODY></HTML>
I wrote back, explaining that his mail was essentially unreadable at my end, and that if he wants me to read what he has to say, he should send it in a format that doesn't require more work from me. Ideally plaintext (drat! I forgot to mention that lines should be shorter than 80 characters) though I'd settle for two-part (plain + HTML). I'm not familiar with his mail program, KMail, but it appears to be a Linux/KDE application. I'll be surprised and disppointed if KMail turns out not to have a way to specify that mail should be sent in plaintext.
EDIT, a moment later: Wow, it's actually much easier to read the text in a browser window -- even with the HTML codes visible -- than in my telnet window where it's wall-to-wall. So this doesn't really convey the mangnutide of the fugliness. But now that I'm seeing it more legibly, I find myself thinking things like "you need tables for a #$*%ing email message???".
(no subject)
(no subject)
You need to move to a vaguely modern mailreader. Vanilla mailx/Mail is not adequate anymore. Really.
I suggest mutt. Really. I mean it. Along with the appropriate autoview config lines and a mailcap entry, you get to see html mail from people in plain text, the links gathered at the bottom, and it all works well.
I'm pretty sure it should run under cygwin, it comes on every linux distro I've looked at, it's available for most other *ix's. (I'm looking at fink right now to see if MacOS X is one of them...well, fink thinks it can at least build it...)
Yes, complaining about it not having a plain text version is good. But it was a pretty reasonable email, overall, and rendered just fine...
Re:
I have Mutt (under RH and Mandrake), which I use when I get way behind on Elbows or PDML and want to sort/delete by thread. But I hate replying in it. I also use it when I actually need to decode a MIME attachment, which doesn't happen often. And to mail a binary, but that's straight from the comand line: "echo 'one line message' | mutt -x -a filename -s subject recipient", so I don't have to deal with the user interface.
(In addition to not liking the UI -- though I'll say that it's a lot more Glennish than anything I've seen under MacOS or Windows so far -- I've got a configuration problem on my LAN that causes Mutt to complain about locks not working right, so I have to run it on the file server if I want to make any changes to any files; /bin/mail ignores the NFS lock issue, so I can run it on my usual login machine. But part of the reason I haven't tried harder to fix that problem is that I don't like Mutt well enough in the first place.)
What I really need is a modernized version of /bin/mail, with MIME awareness, maybe HTML, and sort-by-thread. Plus a couple of message-status flags. What I don't need is to use a tool that Bugs The Shit Out Of Me every single day I use it. *shrug* Mutt's pretty impressively designed, but it's got a couple of aspects that don't work well for me personally.
Somebody suggested mh a while back. I need to take a look at that.
Re:
And of course, things can be configured, on build, to deal with different locking situations...
Re:
*waves* :)
Re:
yay mh :)
Re: Mail User Agents
rendering HTML into plain text (plus being able to fire up links/lynx
for you if you want to follow a link), it also will work with an IMAP
server (and you won't notice _much_ difference than running it on local
mailboxes). Plus there's a native Windows port should you need that.
The configuration can sometimes be daunting when searching for a particular feature you know "must be in there somewhere", but overall
it isn't bad (can use the built-in config editor, or just edit the .pinerc file). If you want to know more, you can email me at "vicky at steeds dot com".
- Vicky
Re: Hey! I know you!
Me too.
(no subject)
Re:
and a line in my .mailcap:
and a little script in $HOME/bin/h2txt:
#!/bin/sh # /usr/local/bin/html2text perl -pe 'BEGIN{$/=">"} s/(<pre>auto_view text/html</pre>
and a line in my .mailcap:
<pre>text/html; $HOME/bin/h2txt '%s'; copiousoutput; description=HTML Text; nametemplate=%s.html</pre>
and a little script in $HOME/bin/h2txt:
<pre>
#!/bin/sh
# /usr/local/bin/html2text
perl -pe 'BEGIN{$/=">"} s/(<img[^<>]*)/$1 alt=""/i' "$@" |
lynx -dump -force_html /proc/self/fd/0
</pre>
html mail shows up looking kinda like:
<pre>
[-- Autoview using $HOME/bin/h2txt ''/home/jailbait/.muttmp/mutt.html'' --]
Hi JB,
I was talking with {person} and she mentioned your name as someone
with good security skills. I would like the opportunity to speak with
you about you job status and openings I have that may be a fit for
you.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Regards,
{Other person}
Sr. Staffing Consultant
{Company}
{Phone}
[1]mailto:{email_addr}
References
1. mailto:{email_addr}
</pre>
without having to think about it.
for application/msword in auto_view and a call to catdoc in my .mailcap, I can read word attachments.
And so on.
It is good.
(no subject)
-m