On Mon, Aug 29, 2022 at 10:43:45AM EDT, Tavis Ormandy wrote:
> On 2022-08-29, Kurt Hackenberg wrote:
> > Maybe text/plain format=flowed is a solution. It's displayed
> > correctly by software that assumes format=fixed (on a screen that's
> > wide enough), and at any width by software that understands
> > format=flowed. Mutt can display format=flowed correctly at any width,
> > if it's configured to.
> >
> > Do phone mail readers understand text/plain format=flowed?
>
> No, format=flowed sounds like the perfect solution but I've tested and
> as far as I can tell it's ignored by gmail on Android, for example.
Correct -- I went through all the rigmarole to set up f=f on Mutt for a
while, and one of the *main reasons* I did so was in the hope that my
mail would display better on mobile mail readers -- which it certainly
did not.
Well, in fairness, it works on FairEmail for instance, but since GMail
for Android is probably one of the most commonly used mailreaders out
there at this point, if it's not supported by that it was kind of
pointless for my use case, for all intents and purposes.
> If we can't even get format=flowed supported, then a new MIME type is
> probably not a workable solution :)
>
> I think it sounds like turning off linewrap is the only realistic
> solution... [snip]
FWIW, the solution/compromise I ended up using was to compose
multipart/alternative mails with mutt, sending a very simple HTML mail
and a standard hard-wrapped text-based mail as well. So mobile
mailreaders can read it perfectly, and desktop users can read the
plaintext version correctly as well.
Believe it or not, mutt actually has very sophisticated functionality to
achieve this, and even comes with a sample script called markdown2html
to assist with this. I tend to write plaintext mails using a subset of
markdown *anyway*, so it works out very well.
And since sending such mails would obviously annoy certain people (eg,
the users of this ML!) I have mutt set up to prompt if I want to send as
multipart/alternative defaulting to no, as in:
set send_multipart_alternative = ask-no
