smarkmail: sending multipart/alternative html mail from mutt

rjbs on 2007-04-09T14:44:24

Some people really want to see fancy HTML mail. They want italics and inline images and all sorts of nonsense that makes my teeth itch. I used to ignore any such mail that I got, because it was mostly from people from whom I didn't expect good mail. Then I started getting more mail like that from my family, and I groaned and set up a mailcap entry to make Mutt dump the HTML messages to text with w3m or lynx and it was bearable again.

Now that I'm sending lots of links to images to the extended family ("Look how cute my baby was today!"), I'm getting back a little more confusion about these crazy text links and non-attached photos... still, I'll be damned if I'm going to run Mail.app and wait ages for it to get running, complain about certs, crash, and so on. (This complaint goes for all other GUI mailers I've used. See a previous rant on the subject.)

At some point, I realized that it would be really easy to use Markdown to convert text to HTML for email, just like I do for lots of other things (like this journal post, for example). I was a little stung when I realized that Mutt wouldn't let me build a MIME message via my editor: it strips the Content-Type and MIME-Version headers. I got around that by writing my own sendmail replacement.

It's not quite ready for use yet; I need to decide on a way to indicate that the message is ready to send, and I need to test it with a few quoting styles. I'd also like to make it use the desperately-in-need-of-dev-release Email::Sender rather than Email::Send. I'd love to make Addex help indicate who gets html. Still, it basically works.

use strict;
use warnings;

use Email::MIME;
use Email::MIME::Creator;
use Email::Send ();
use Text::Markdown ();

sub markdown_email {
  my ($email) = @_;

  my $body_text = $email->body;

  my $html = Text::Markdown::markdown($body_text, { tab_width => 2 });

  my $html_part = Email::MIME->create(
    attributes => { content_type => 'text/html', },
    body       => $html,
  );

  my $text_part = Email::MIME->create(
    attributes => { content_type => 'text/plain', },
    body       => $body_text,
  );

  $email->content_type_set('multipart/alternative');
  $email->parts_set([ $html_part, $text_part ]);
}

my $text = do { local $/;  };

my $email = Email::MIME->new(\$text);

markdown_email($email);

my $rv = Email::Send->new({ mailer => 'SMTP' })->send($email);
die "$rv" unless $rv;

I'll make noise again when it's done-er.

---

neat idea

markjugg on 2007-04-09T15:11:36

neat idea, rjbs. I'd like to see an example of samples inputs and outputs when you are done.

I think I'd be more likely to give in to an HTML mailer, myself.

I'm currently trying Evolution on Linux because my Thunderbird had some serious performance problems for basic tasks. Evolution 2.8 is OK, but is not a keyboard friendly, nor as a customizable. My search for the perfect mail client continues...

Re:neat idea

rjbs on 2007-04-11T01:14:09

I'll send you some output soon.

What do you mean when you say, "I think I'd be more likely to give in to an HTML mailer, myself"?

I don't think I'd change MUA just to send HTML mail.