
Write Gmail in Emacs the Easy Way: gmail-message-mode - lelf
http://endlessparentheses.com/write-gmail-in-emacs-the-easy-way-gmail-message-mode.html
======
e12e
So, I guess people really do use html mail now. I'm a little sad, but not
surprised. I do find it a little bit ironic converting markdown (a format for
structured plain text, allowing for easy quoting, in-line replies etc) to
html.

That aside, I can understand the frustration with web interfaces, and if
committed to using gmail, why not have a nice interface for composing mails at
least?

My current pet peeve with google interfaces, are the text-editing boxes on g+
-- which are not text-boxes, and so doesn't work with "it's all text" \-- and
also breaks cut'n'paste for long sections of text. So I end up editing a text-
file in vim, then copying section by section in ordert to post into g+
communities. Sigh.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-
text/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/)

~~~
nextos
I dislike that email, which predates the web, adopted html. And quite
frustrated that many clients do not attach an equivalent plain text version of
the email.

I thought this would be a problem, but frankly piping in everything into w3m
makes it surprisingly easy to stay plain text only if desired.

~~~
eddieroger
At the risk of being accused of being on your lawn, what do you dislike about
email's adoption of HTML? I'm old enough to remember the walled garden "mail"
of Prodigy and early AOL, and the advent of inter-network electronic mail, but
I feel like HTML is a major contributing factor to taking email from something
people didn't realize they had ("AOL gives me e-mail?") to something we can't
live without now.

~~~
noise
Aside from spam, I mean marketing emails, what email do you send or receive
that needs HTML?

~~~
whyenot
> that needs HTML?

I think you are setting the bar a little too high. It seems to me like there
is quite a bit of mail that benefits from HTML. Superscripts, subscripts,
italics, bold and colored text (used in moderation), inline images (used in
moderation) can be really useful when discussing concepts that aren't easily
reduced to characters.

Suppose your email would benefit from some mathematical formulas. You can do
the old standby and drop into latex math mode, but the person on the other end
of the email might not understand what you mean by

\sum_{n=1}^k\,\frac{1}{n} \;=\; \ln k + \gamma + \varepsilon_k < \ln k + 1

much easier and clearer to use LaTeXiT or something similar and copy/paste in
an inline image with the formula correctly formatted.

Or, say you are a taxonomist. Italics in species names are not just a
stylistic choice, they also convey additional meaning. For example in

 _Epilobium ciliatum_ Raf. subsp. _watsonii_ (Barbey) Hoch & P.H. Raven f.
_rosa_

the italics show what parts of the full scientific name refer to the species
and what parts refer to authors or levels of taxonomic organization
(subspecies and form). You can't do that with plain text (you could of course
do it with markdown, though)...

plain text is sufficient of course; but sometimes the additional bells and
whistles of HTML really are useful.

~~~
e12e
I generally think /italics/ and __bold __, quoting "> ", ">> " etc work fine.
In addition to utf-8 encoding, you've covered a lot of ground (for English-
speakers, utf-8 might seem like a luxury, and of course, if you demand unicode
support you're beyond "basic" plain text -- it is however what I mean when I
say I prefer plain text emails).

Formulas an illustrations can usually just be appended (and while they won't
be shown _in-line_ most clients will display images (and those choosing
clients that don't won't really complain), but yeah, if you need multimedia
you need multimedia.

Now, I don't really see how an image of an equation is really enough -- if
you're working with someone, you'd want them to be able to quote you, reply to
you -- and most importantly, tweak your work (edit your equations). I'd argue
such (genuinely rich documents) don't really belong in email. Use a wiki or
something (and then you can email wiki-markup...).

In short, I'm not convinced all the down sides and added complexity of html
mail is worth the hassle.

Are rich documents and hypertext (hypermedia) a good idea? Yes. Does it imply
a truly object oriented system, essentially mailing each other runnable
smalltalk code? Yes. Will that be secure? No. Will that be standardized? Not
by the looks of things. This is essentially why office suites are a source of
security holes and incompatibilities. And web apps (though differently).

------
neonkiwi
This tool involves switching to Emacs to compose a message body, while doing
all of your mail interactions with the web interface. Once composing is done,
the content is sent to the browser. Optionally, you can write in markdown,
processing that before the hand-off back to the browser.

It would be possible to eliminate the back-and-forth jumping, just doing
everything in Emacs, using the recently-announced Gmail API[1]. To the author,
is this something you've considered doing? I'd use something like that.

[1]
[https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/](https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/)

~~~
BruceConnor
This actually sounds nice and not too difficult. Thanks for pointing it out.
Unfortunately, I barely have time to improve my existing packages anymore, let
alone create new ones.

So yes, it is something I've considered, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I
were you.

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HerrMonnezza
I have been using "Gmail old compose"[1] together with "It's all text" / "Edit
with Emacs" to achieve the same effect. With the old compose, there's no need
to convert to/from HTML: email body is just text.

[1]: [http://home.oldcompose.com/](http://home.oldcompose.com/)

~~~
davidw
You can just use the settings to default to text emails, as I do.

~~~
HerrMonnezza
I can find no such option in my Gmail settings. Where is it?

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arohner
I recently started using mutt, connecting to GMail w/ IMAP. It's been working
pretty well.

I'm still really interested in a full mail client that supports all of gmail's
features (labels, archiving, etc), and works well with Emacs.

~~~
rakoo
I suggest you take a look at sup ([http://supmua.org/](http://supmua.org/)).
Its goal is to transpose the gmail experience on your terminal.

I've been working with the maildirroot branch [0] which mimics the IMAP
installation of GMail, so you can use a standard OfflineIMAP to sync between
your computer and GMail, and still use all the power of
tagging/archiving/searching on your computer.

Oh and it has a few niceties, the most important one to me being native
support of gpg.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the maintainers.

[0] [https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/tree/maildir-
root](https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/tree/maildir-root)

~~~
gcr
Once you've looked at sup, take a look at Notmuch
([http://notmuchmail.org/](http://notmuchmail.org/)), which separates the
search/indexing of incoming messages from the mail composition from
sending/receiving. As a spiritual sup successor, it has a few nice clients for
the command line (bower?) and various editors (Emacs, maybe a vim client too)

------
e40
I still use MH-E + nmh in Emacs on Linux, and I had phantasies of using it
with IMAP and the GNU version of nmh, but I've never really seen someone say
it works. Anyone?

~~~
nextos
If you're looking for a fast IMAP syncing tool, isync (mbync) is great. I used
offlineimap for many years, but it was buggy, slow and heavy.

It's a tiny C utility written by the mutt creator, Theodore Tso and others, so
it's very good as expected.

~~~
jfb
It has a peculiarly complicated configuration, but it has been 100%
bulletproof for me.

~~~
nextos
Just curious, what did you find complicated?

~~~
jfb
That's a good question. It's one of those things that I _remember_ being
complicated, but when I look over my configuration, it seems pretty damn
straightforward. I guess the fact that Channels and Groups share a namespace
irritated me?

Anyway. It's a great piece of invisible, blue-collar software.

------
baldfat
Richard Stallman has just cried. I can't even think how mad he would be to
know people use his Emacs to compose gmail messages.

