plainMail2HTML enables users of Mutt (and possibly other textual Email clients) to send HTML-formatted Emails.

To make this more tangible, lets assume you're using a textual Email client, for instance the Mutt Email client. Text Emails are great and have many advantages over HTML Email messages, but in some situations one might want to be able to have more control over the format of Email messages he or she want to send. For example, you might want to send messages with visual formatting such as bold fonts, or headings, or bullet lists.

Another issue, sometimes even more important, is controlling the direction and alignment of the text displayed by the recipient's Email client—when you send plain text message, the direction in which the text will be rendered depends on the capabilities of the Email reader used by recipients of your Email. If you write in a right-to-left language, for example Arabic or Hebrew, many current Email readers still do not implement the Unicode Bidirectional algorithm and might render messages you send incorrectly.

One method to overcome the above issues is using HTML Email, which may contain formatting and text direction information. This is where plainMail2HTML can be of use.

plainMail2HTML works as a filter—you pipe into it an Email object that contains only a text/plain component, and out comes an Email that contains, in addition, a text/HTML component. Markup language directives you may use in the original text are converted by plainMail2HTML to HTML formatting elements.

From the user's perspective, using plainMail2HTML doesn't change the workflow at all and is completely transparent—the only difference is that markup language in your text will now be converted to HTML on the fly when the message is sent. HTML text direction tags will be created automatically based on the language the message is written in.

• Installation
  • Requirements
  • Configuration
  • Setting up Mutt
• Usage
• Notes
  • How it works
  • Markup Parsing Errors
  • Limitations
• Credits
• License

The following sections describe how to install and configure the system.

plainMail2HTML uses the Python Docutils system. On Debian systems you can install it with:

aptitude install python-docutils

or, if you're using python3:

aptitude install python3-docutils

html-sendmail tries to read configuration from the file ~/home/amit/.plain2htmlrc, if it exists.

This file may set the values of the following variables:

sendmail_cmd: this defines the external command used for actually sending the Email. If it is not set, the default command used is /usr/sbin/sendmail -oi. Users of msmtp may set this variable that way:

sendmail_cmd=/usr/bin/msmtp

p2h_flags: Additional flags for plain2html. Currently the only usefull setting is -b, which tells plain2html to encode the HTML part using 8bit instead of the default Base64. To encode massages in 8bit, set this variable as follows:

p2h_flags=-b

A sample configuration file comes with the package in the doc/examples directory.

Additional configuration, for example changing the default HTML template or the HTML parser, can be done in the system settings file.

To start using this system for sending Email messages with Mutt, all you need to do is to modify the value of Mutt's sendmail configuration variable—it should be set to the full path of the html-sendmail script.

Assuming you installed plainMail2HTML in the directory ~/plainMail2HTML, you'll need to modify the sendmail setting in Mutt's configuration file (usually ~/.muttrc or ~/.mutt/muttrc) to read:

set sendmail = ~/plainMail2HTML/bin/html-sendmail

You can setup Mutt to enable switching between sending 'standard' text mail and HTML mail dynamically using a shortcut key.

To do that, copy the two Mutt scripts sendmail-html.rc and sendmail-plain.rc from the doc/examples directory to your ~/.mutt directory. Then, in your muttrc file, replace the line

set sendmail = ~/plainMail2HTML/bin/html-sendmail

with the line

source ~/.mutt/sendmail-html.rc

(this will make sending HTML mail the default; if you prefer the default to be plain text, source the other script.)

Now Control+s will switch between the two modes. If you prefer a different key binding, modify the two aforementioned Mutt scripts.

The general idea this mechanism is based on is described in the Mutt Wiki.

Using Mutt's built in hooks it is possible to set the Mail Mode (text/plain or HTML) automatically based on the message's attributes, e.g. its recipients.

For detailed configuration example, see the sample Mutt script switching-mail-sending-mode under the doc/examples directory.

After the system is installed and Mutt, for instance, is configured to use it, you don't need to do anything special—you compose and send messages in the same way you've always done. The system will add a HTML component to each message when it is sent.

The only difference is that now you can use markup in your text to format it. For example, if your text looks like this (reStructuredText is used),

This is *formatted* text sent with **plainMail2HTML**.

* Apples
* Oranges
* Pears

Some code::

    def bar():
	    return 42

a HTML Email reader would display it like that:

plainMail2HTML seems to work just fine with Mutt, but there are some technical details, issues and limitations one might want to know.

plainMail2HTML reads an Email message from a file (which can be the standard input). It is assumed that the Email Mime type is either text/plain, or multipart/mixed that contains a text/plain message.

plainMail2HTML then parse the text in the Email's text/plain component using predefined markup language parser, and creates HTML-formatted text. This component is then added to a copy of the original Email, so it contains both a 'text/plain' and a 'text/html' components.

Currently the system include only reStructuredText parser, but it should be fairly easy to add other parsing tools—the parser could be a single Python script, and the parser used by the system is defined in its configuration file (see the markup directory of this package).

It is worth noting that this system was designed based on the structure of Email objects created by Mutt. Probably it is not general enough for being able to handle any Email created by any Email client.

Another thing to keep in mind is that improper markup format will cause the system to complain. This feature is desired, but could be annoying when replying to Emails you received. Text in your reply originating from the Email you're replying to might not be in a 'correct format' from the parser point of view, and, if you leave such text in your reply you might need to modify it in order for it to comply (another reason for using inline replying.)

Although not tested, I suppose this system wont work with Emails encrypted by Mutt.

Credit goes to Beni Cherniavsky for writing the hibidi.py module, which create the HTML bidi markup. His original code can be obtained here. You can read more about it in the Docutils FAQ.

I did some slight modifications to the original code to make it Python 3 compatible.

This project is released under GNU General Public License v3.0.