Outlook-style quoting for Gnus

From: "Elias Mårtenson" <lokedhs@gmail.com>
To: info-gnus-english@gnu.org
Subject: Outlook-style quoting for Gnus
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2013 10:34:27 +0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CADtN0W+f_Ohf34j8oXDzgf2LP+GP0fjaCcaOWXDWqmqtCZbUHQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)

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At work I suffer from a problem that I suppose is not unique in the world:
Being in an organisation that exclusively uses Outlook. For quite some time
I suffered using Thunderbird, but I don't think I have to tell anyone here
that that is not an ideal situation. Especially when most of the corporate
communication is happening through email.

I tried using Gnus, but I realised quickly that the everybody expects the
replies to conform to the (yes, quite horrible) citation style of Outlook.
This means that emails are HTML, and that the entire email chain prior is
included in each mail. This includes preserved formatting and images. I
also realised that Gnus had no way to provide this.

This needed a solution. If one doesn't exist: Make one.

So, I did. Me and a colleague have been using this for a while now, and it
works quite effectively. So I felt it's time to ask the larger community if
this this is something that anyone else has worked on addressing, and
whether or not this is something that other people may also have a need for.

Currently, apart from handling the Outlook-style quoting, with all its
horrible quirks, it also uses Muse for marking up the text that you write.
I have been thinking of switching this to Org instead. Doing so should be
fairly simple, as most of the infrastructure is already in place.

Anyway, here's the code if anyone is interested in taking a look:

https://github.com/lokedhs/gnus-outlook-style

The biggest problem right now for anyone who would like to try this is that
it requires an external helper application. I needed to do it that way
since there is no stable (and forgiving) HTML parser in Elisp. Adding to
this is the fact that even the one in CL (closure-html) also barfs on the
mess that Outlook spews out, so I had to patch it. The patch is included in
my distribution, but it's not yet part of the standard distribution.

Anyway, have fun (wait, no. Outlook is involved, so fun is not part of it).
Please take a look if you're interested. :-)

Regards,
Elias

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