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Pleasant HTML Mail
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<h1>
Pleasant HTML Mail
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<p>
I’ve always found HTML email to be unpleasant (even before I knew about HTML vs plain-text email), but it’s always been just an annoyance. However, I now use a <abbr title="Terminal User Interface">TUI</abbr> mail client (<a href="https://aerc-mail.org/">aerc</a>), so HTML emails are downright unreadable.
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I solved this by preprocessing HTML mails with <code>lynx -dump -stdin</code>, which turned out to be surprisingly pleasant. Because Lynx behaves like a filter in this mode, it just turns HTML emails into nicely-formatted plain-text emails. I say “nicely formatted” because lynx indents its output according to the document’s structure, which is particularly nice for long newsletters.
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For example, the FSF is really good about providing a plain-text alternative to their newsletters. The problem, though, is that their newsletters are really long, so parts of it can easily get buried.
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Here’s an example of their plain-text newsletter:
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<pre>
# Newsletter Title
## First article title
Paragraphs and paragraphs of text.
## Second article title
Paragraphs and paragraphs of text.
## Third article title
You get the picture.
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But then here’s an example of their HTML newsletter run through lynx:
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<pre>
Newsletter Title
First article title
Paragraphs and paragraphs of text.
Second article title
Paragraphs and paragraphs of text.
Third article title
You get the picture.
</pre>
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I normally wouldn’t write a post about such a small thing, but I was so pleasantly surprised by this that I wanted to share it.
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© DJ Chase 2022-08-30. Licensed under the Academic Free License (AFL 3.0).
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