[Alpine-info] links contained in forwarded emails.

[Joshua Miller]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 5:29 PM, Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote:


> On Tue, 22 Nov 2011, Stan Peale wrote:

>

>  Has anyone thought more about how I can keep the links active in

>> forwarded emails from alpine.  Now the links are stripped from all emails

>> that I forward.

>>

>

>

> I don't understand how that is possible.  Are you using some kind of

> filter?  I use Alpine, of course, and I've never seen that happen.  I'm

> using Alpine 2.00 from the Ubuntu synaptic repository, if that matters.

>

>

Just a stab in the dark cause, as I've read this thread, it seems that the
problem may not be described as clearly as it could be.

My guess would be that by "link", the GP means an active link that was
marked up with HTML in the original message, like <a href="
http://www.google.com">www.google.com</a>.

The orig message was likely a multipart-alternative body, with both
text/plain and text/html parts.

When replying in alpine, the message sent is just a text/plain message. The
URL's will probably be included, but may not be present if the user replied
to the text/html part and the link text wasn't the URL (ex. <a href="
http://www.google.com">at google</a>). In any case, it won't be an active
html anchor that is sent from alpine, cause it's all just text/plain.

Without more details, that'd be my guess. And if that's right, then there's
not much that can be done about that at this time.

Personally, and somewhat related, my top feature request after over a
decade of using pine is for the ability to send messages as
multipart-alternative with both a text/plain version and text/html like all
modern clients do. I have no interest in lots of fancy HTML markup options,
but if there was an alternate editor invocation to edit the html part, then
pine used it's html rendering engine (or an option to use an external
program for that, like w3m with a dump) to make the text/plain part, I
think that'd be just swell. I've tried a bunch of ways to make a sending
filter to do something like that with no luck (pine jacks the resulting
mime type).

FWIW, I'm with the camp that thinks email should be plain text, but I think
we lost the war and it's time to concede to the current compromise (sending
multipart-alternative). The sending, coupled with the recent thread about
viewing html emails and getting the in-line attachments to display
correctly, would probably allow people to ditch the occasional use of
thunderbird (or similar) - having to bounce between clients, even
occasionally, surely makes using alpine less attractive (not so much I'm
giving it up though).

I think these features would also give alpine a leg up on mutt and the
other text based MUI's. I don't know why people are against adding this
feature... it would be non-intrusive, no one would be forced to use it, and
it'd reuse so much code there'd be nearly no bloat to the codebase. (ex.
see this thread:
http://does-not-exist.org/mail-archives/mutt-dev/msg08115.html)

Sorry if my tangent ends up thread-jacking :-)
--
Josh I.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/pipermail/alpine-info/attachments/20111122/4803e326/attachment.htm