[VM] Handling HTML mail

[Konrad Hinsen]

I wonder what the state of the art in reading HTML messages with VM is.

My current setup use w3m to convert HTML to plain text:

(setq vm-mime-text/html-handler 'w3m)

This produces very readable text, better than in some GUI-based mail
readers with poor HTML rendering engines. The only feature that I miss
is clickable links directly in the message. I receive many HTML
e-mails that are just link collections. For now I have to pass them to
an external viewer in order to use the links. Since Emacs can handle
clickable links in text buffers, I wonder if there is a way to get
this in VM.

Konrad.

[Uday Reddy]

Post by Konrad Hinsen
I wonder what the state of the art in reading HTML messages with VM is.

emacs-w3m. Also written as Emacs/W3M.

I think there is an EmacsWiki page on it, which tells you how to get it and
install it.

You will need to rebuild VM after you install it, because there are various
autoconfiguration settings.

Somebody still needs to write an EmacsWiki page describing how to configure
emacs-w3m for use with VM. Any volunteers?

Cheers,
Uday

[Konrad Hinsen]

Post by Uday Reddy

Post by Konrad Hinsen
I wonder what the state of the art in reading HTML messages with VM is.

emacs-w3m. Also written as Emacs/W3M.
I think there is an EmacsWiki page on it, which tells you how to get it and
install it.

There is, but it's still a bit tricky, especially for those who (like
me) use Emacs 24. The last official release (going back to 2005!) doesn't
work with Emacs 24. You have to grab a development snapshot, via CVS or
as a tarball from the ViewCVS page. Here is the direct link to the tarball:

http://cvs.namazu.org/emacs-w3m.tar.gz?view=tar

For installing a development snapshot, you need to have autoconf installed
and run it before configure etc.

Post by Uday Reddy
Somebody still needs to write an EmacsWiki page describing how to configure
emacs-w3m for use with VM. Any volunteers?

I did nothing but

(require 'w3m-load)

and judging from first tests this seems to work fine. I get HTML mails
displayed nicely in VM buffers, and I can follow links and have them
opened.

I am sure there are lots of useful configurations for making w3m and
vm work together even better, but it seems to work fine right out of
the box!

Thanks for the hint,
Konrad.

[Uday Reddy]

Post by Konrad Hinsen
I am sure there are lots of useful configurations for making w3m and
vm work together even better, but it seems to work fine right out of
the box!

Yes, it works fine out of the box. But, down the line, lots of things go
wrong. The key bindings conflict, the page width is not honored, it churns
out annoying messages about unsafe links, some URL's break across lines, and
all such stuff.

As you said right in the beginning, it is still a bit tricky. The
documentation is not very good. The developers don't understand English
well enough and so on.

We need somebody who cares about html mail sufficiently to take charge of it
and figure out solutions for all these problems.

Cheers,
Uday

[Julian Bradfield]

I pipe my html section through lynx -dump, which seems fine to me.

[Konrad Hinsen]

Post by Uday Reddy
We need somebody who cares about html mail sufficiently to take charge of it
and figure out solutions for all these problems.

I do care and I'd be happy to document what needs to be configured as
I discover all the settings and options. I'll start keeping a log.

Konrad.

[Uday Reddy]

Post by Konrad Hinsen
I do care and I'd be happy to document what needs to be configured as
I discover all the settings and options. I'll start keeping a log.

Thanks very much! I will send you separately a bunch of problems that I
often run into.

Cheers,
Uday