Mutt and Neomutt users now have a trick available in their toolbox to mess with senders who try to embedd web pages in their e-mail. A guide entititled (Neo)mutt fuckery with multipart messages walks through the steps to get either client to turn regular e-mails into MIME multipart messages by tacking a lame message on as text/html.
I've been using Mutt, and then Neomutt, as an email client on my laptops for a while (I generally use Evolution on my desktop, because it runs on GNOME, while the laptops run on i3wm). Today while talking with colleagues who also use a TUI, text-only email client, we realized we had one shared pain about this, which was receiving multipart emails where the text/plain part was either the HTML source of the text/html part or a single line saying "This email has no plain text version, refer to the HTML version" (If you don't know how multipart emails and MIME work, wikipedia has a good primer).
We thought it might be fun as retaliation to send multipart emails, with the text/html part saying "This email has no HTML version, please refer to the plain text". An hour and a few curses at mutt's documentation later, I'd come up with this solution: [...]
[...] P.S.: I know I shouldn't have to say this but please don't actually use this to annoy people who use graphical email clients. We're the weird ones, basically everyone uses a graphical email client, and they're clearly the standard now, plus it's clearly a dick move to do this. Please refrain. Thank you for your understanding ❤️
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The Linux mailing list had an admonition for Mutt users to fix their Mutt configuration. A recent change to that otherwise popular e-mail client has broken the way Message-ID headers are formed in Mutt. The developers have proven unwilling so far to fix it, therefore the onus falls upon Mutt's regular users to make local reconfigurations to avoid breaking the mailing lists and archives they might be participating in.
At some point in the recent past, mutt changed the way it generates Message-ID header values. Instead of the perfectly good old way of doing it, the developers switched to using base64-encoded random bytes. The base64 dictionary contains the / character, which causes unnecessary difficulties when linking to these messages on lore.kernel.org, since the / character needs to be escaped as %2F for everything to work properly.
Those receiving Mutt-generated messages will thank you for it, even if silently.
Previously:
(2018) (Neo)mutt F***ery with Multipart Messages
(Score: 1) by zoward on Sunday July 08 2018, @01:53PM (6 children)
I use it daily. While I applaud the poster's ingenuity and mischief, I never felt the need to do this to anyone I want to send email to. As they said, we're the weird ones.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 08 2018, @01:55PM (3 children)
Hell, any more if you're not using gmail, you're one of the weird ones. Sigh. I miss pine.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 08 2018, @02:03PM (2 children)
I guess you could say that you "pine" for the old software.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday July 08 2018, @07:09PM (1 child)
Apparently hipsters think "elm" is a language :( (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elm_(programming_language))
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Monday July 09 2018, @08:42AM
Hipsters have started programming computers? My God ..
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheGratefulNet on Sunday July 08 2018, @07:02PM (1 child)
we're not the weird ones. we're the smarter ones. we KNOW that shit can come thru email and by using text-only, you don't give callbacks to web bugs or exe files or other stupid junk that does not belong in email.
we SHOULD anno^Weducate the stupid masses that their 'graphical world' has major security issues. not due to being graphical, but being led on by media companies who should know better, but turn a blind eye.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday July 12 2018, @08:14PM
It's not only about security but also forcing people to keep messages simple and to the point. Not distracting by means of text style etc.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by BsAtHome on Sunday July 08 2018, @02:51PM (22 children)
I strongly disagree. It should be used to annoy people. Those html junkies are annoying me too with their html shite. For a change, let them feel the pain they inflict upon others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 08 2018, @02:56PM
Agree. People can think for themselves whether they want to send this kind of email to their bosses or customers.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Sunday July 08 2018, @03:19PM (17 children)
While the ship has long since sailed on this one, I absolutely HATE html email with a fucking passion. I have thunderbird configured to use text by default, but for most work stuff I end up having to to use Shift-Reply and the like to reply as formatted, so as to not completely break others formatted crap...complete with embedded screenshots of terminal output, where they could have pasted the console text. I could go on all day.
The worst for me is email from outlook / exchange. In almost every email I get from those cluster-fucks, copying and pasting text out of the emails always adds an extra newline between every line. I can even look at the source of the email and the extra newlines are in fact there. I've never been able to figure out what does this but it drives me to fucking distraction. I think it might be outlook defaulting the newlines in emails to be paragraphs(?)...no clue.
I also love how the formatted mode of most graphical mail clients will NOT let you copy text from another email / whatever without copying the fucking font and text size etc...OMG that puts me through the roof. I end up echoing the text in a console and copying that. Again...I could go on all day.
I've always loved this [tjkelly.com]:
Amen.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 08 2018, @04:01PM (1 child)
> I also love how the formatted mode of most graphical mail clients will NOT let you copy text from another email / whatever without copying the fucking font and text size etc...OMG that puts me through the roof. I end up echoing the text in a console and copying that. Again...I could go on all day.
Office software (be it MS Office, LibreOffice or w/e), and pretty much anything that works with formatted text, works the same way. Some applications offer a "paste unformatted text" option in some menu somewhere, but mostly I just pipe it through a good old text editor.
Going through the console seems a bit dangerous.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Sunday July 08 2018, @04:05PM
Well...yea...I only echo text to the console when it's a small amount of text and I can clearly see what it is. Anything more I paste into gvim.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday July 09 2018, @01:14AM (6 children)
My random slightly off-topic email rant:
Email was/is the first social media and it is still incredibly successful. Why doesn't someone pick up thunderbird and build an open social media structure around it. Mozilla was trying to give it away a couple of years ago - how very short-sighted. They have the necessary ingredients to form the core of something great: open, decentralised software; massive user base; system embedded in nearly every corporate structure (albeit with outlook as the client).
Mozilla should be on this - it is surely part of their core mission! It can break tweetbook and friendface (remember friendface is a virus)!
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Monday July 09 2018, @02:45AM (5 children)
There's no user authentication built into the transit mechanisms and most ISPs block port 25. I'm sure it'll work out as soon as you teach the world PGP. I guess to get around the unwashed masses you could host a public email server, but at that point, why bother calling it email? It's just a distributed database with an SMTP API for remote systems interfacing with you dataset. Or you could just open yet another Gmail account because it's the same thing.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Monday July 09 2018, @12:25PM (4 children)
> Or you could just open yet another Gmail account because it's the same thing.
Sorry, it's one of my pet rants.
My point is that a gmail account is fundamentally different to a friendface account because email is an open, widely accepted standard whereas friendface is not. If I were mozilla I would use that as leverage to extend the email standard (potentially in the ways you hint at) into social media; I am shocked that yahoo, google et alia have not done so already rather than repeatedly regurgitating failed attempts like google plus/ google hangouts/etc.
The market is crying out for an open standard here (not just soylentils but mundanes as well). It is clear to me that were everyone who was not friendface to collectively agree on some open standard, with privacy tied in, then they could hammer friendface.
* Google wins because many mundanes do not care for privacy (the gmail model, as you point out).
* Non-mundanes win because we can set up our own "social media" server that has whatever privacy settings. We provide a nice, dedicated, core for journo's to write lefty articles about. It's great advertising.
* Corporate wins because they can host their own "social media" platform, without exposing their staff to evil friendface. Just like every corporation hosts an email server.
There is no technical reason, I believe, that this can't be done. As I say, I am shocked no one has done it yet. Mozilla is obvious outfit to take leadership.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 09 2018, @05:08PM
The Matrix project is trying to do this, but based on Slack and other "IRC with spyware and dank meme emojis" software instead of friendface. My main problems with them are that the protocol is an absolute pig from what little I've seen of it (basically imagine XMPP as written by frontend devs) and the fact that they have no business model: the project was started by an infrastructure company that wanted to make an "open" standard and then sell Matrix servers for fat stacks of cash a la the Red Hat model, but the devs got sacked and now it's administrated by Yet Another Silicon Valley Startup(tm). That being said, it's still probably the least bad option in terms of trying to take control of online discussion back from surveillance capitalists.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday July 12 2018, @01:39AM (2 children)
Tried Diaspora [wikipedia.org] ?
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday July 12 2018, @07:56AM (1 child)
I didn't think diaspora actually worked, although that was when it was first hyped 5 years ago or more. I did briefly look into open source alternatives to friendface and there looked like a few out there; but the point is they need to reach a critical mass, which is unlikely happen without buy in from at least one of amazon, google, etc.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday July 12 2018, @03:17PM
Any alternatives to Diaspora? regardless I think we have to do away with the dependency on any investor. Money will corrupt the whole setup. And any clearly identifiable servers is likely to be subject to political control.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday July 09 2018, @03:01PM (7 children)
That actually kinda makes sense to me, as much as any workaround for M$'s crap can...
My biggest issue with Outlook is that it is *constantly* changing what I've typed. I work with a testing lab that tracks everything by email, which we're forced to do through Outlook. Every friggin' day, you write some query then you mail it to someone else to validate something, and they tell you it won't run because of some syntax error because Outlook changes all the quotes and punctuation and such into invalid characters. Same happens with Unix commands -- you give a hyphen for a switch, the hyphen gets changed to a period. If you paste the command into Outlook to send it, and someone tries to blindly copy/paste and run, it won't run properly and might even break something...so sending a jpeg instead is a fairly simple way to ensure Outlook won't mangle anything. Of course, then you increase the risk of a typo by forcing everyone to retype everything every time...but I guess that's the price you pay for using Microsoft...
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday July 12 2018, @03:21PM (6 children)
Encode all letters with uuencode or base64? or some other encoding that Outlook won't or can't screwup.
Another alternative is to ditch Microsoft.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday July 12 2018, @03:58PM (5 children)
Well, it only screws with the message body, so if you're going to that level of effort you can just attach a file...but people don't often think of that or realize that they need to do that, particularly when their intent isn't necessarily to share code. Nobody wants to mess with attachments or encodings when you're just trying to tell someone which script to execute or what parameters to use. Or people will post the results of a SQL query, and include the query itself...to them it's just proving a validation step, but someone on the other side decides they want to take a look at the actual data too so they copy/paste the query...
If the intent is to share code, then most people do understand that the best way to do that is to just attach the code file itself...but when you're trying to discuss a single line or a single query then it just gets pasted into the message and it's on each individual recipient to understand how to translate that if they need to...which, of course, they always screw up the first dozen times they encounter that particular failure mode. And even then most people just blindly run it and wait for the error to tell them what to fix. Same thing happens with Word/Excel docs too, which can screw with your documentation as well...*usually* it's not a huge problem, *usually* people get an error and realize what they have to fix pretty quickly, so *usually* it's not much of an issue it's just really obnoxious...but sometimes it's worse, sometimes you end up with code fuckery that results in deleted files or lost test results, all because some moron at Microsoft decided it was a good idea to silently replace the text that you actually typed with something different that they thought looked prettier...
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday July 12 2018, @07:07PM (4 children)
So change tools to remove Microsoft from the loop?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday July 12 2018, @07:20PM (3 children)
I'd love to, but I have no choice in that matter.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday July 12 2018, @07:23PM (2 children)
Who makes the choice? and is circumvention prevented in some way?
SMTP over Outlook client?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday July 12 2018, @07:56PM (1 child)
The IT management of a Fortune 10 company makes the choice, and these laptops are so locked down that I'd have to submit a helpdesk ticket just to change the screensaver (which would be denied anyway as a "violation of corporate policy".) I can't connect USB devices either, so I couldn't just install the mail client to a USB stick. Technically speaking I could probably use a "portableapps" style distribution, assuming the firewall would allow me to download it and assuming nobody finds out and fires me for it. They used to allow Outlook Web Access from outside their network, but now even that requires connecting to the VPN first, and personal devices are not permitted on the VPN (I'm assuming a firewall would block it if I tried...I haven't tried because if it worked I'd be risking my job.) So yeah...probably technically possible, but very difficult and not worth my job. They can just pay me for the time it takes to deal with their garbage tools...
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday July 12 2018, @08:12PM
Use any input device like the microphone + speaker as a modem to establish a link to your own device?
Ie do the real work on another device to keep mental health in order and then sync the results over the modem link?
Sounds like a job change might be a thing?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by termigator on Sunday July 08 2018, @06:29PM (2 children)
The problem is most people are ignorant of the problem as many GUI-based MUA clients default to HTML-based composition. I put the primary blame on MUA developers, mainly Microsoft, for the HTML bloat in email. From day one, Microsoft ignored email standards and existing conventions leading their mass-ignorant user base to accept it as the way things are done. My top two pet peaves are top-posting and HTML.
Top posting is now the norm, to where MUAs will actually hide in replies the quoted message that is being replied to. Really annoying for those of use that following the (superior) USENET-style of replying to messages.
With HTML email, you have the following headaches:
- Security exploits
- Bloat (just look at the raw data to see how bad it is)
- No standard message quoting mechanism. It is amusing to see the adhoc methods folks use when they actually need to interleave their reply to the original message.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Sunday July 08 2018, @06:49PM
+10000 to all of that. What kills me is that, on the rare occasion (VERY rare) when I exchange emails with someone that uses plain text and the old ">>>" sort of Usenet quoting, it displays so well in Thunderbird...even using colors to differentiate the reply levels etc, but as far as I've seen, clients like Outlook (the origin of almost all these evils) refuse to display that in a readable manner and in fact destroy it seemingly on purpose with the first reply...usually with like breaks that break the quoting.
There's just no limit to how much I hate all of it. The whole Godless mess was a misguided attempt mainly by MS to turn email into some half-assed word processor with no thought at all given to how it would address the basic shit email was intended for. Your comment on the nightmare of interleaving replies in a message being perhaps the biggest cluster-fuck in all of it.
Oh...and yes the bloat...ffs. I'll bet that alone accounts for at least a third of corporate data storage these days.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday July 12 2018, @01:59AM
Another solution is to ignore or give second rate treatment to senders of text/html ? If they have the brains for real communication they would get into text mode.
Other surprises that can be embedded..
- .EXE files that will popup as "Microsoft is bad for you".
- Large segments of ¬hing; html code to fill the inbox invisibly.
- Insert "begin 644 CON:" which triggers interesting features in some Microsoft clients (perhaps fixed?).
However, usually people that can't express themselves in words feels the need to manipulate the receiver using graphical codes. So it's usually a dead give away of MBA style people or their minions.
The hard selector is if you need the people of text/html or if they need you more. And thus you make the rules of communication.
(Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday July 08 2018, @05:19PM (3 children)
Your EMAIL is a disaster. A fiasco. And I hear this so much it's amazing. I don't do EMAIL. I'll tell you, sometimes your best EMAILS are the ones you don't make!!!
(Score: 3, Touché) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday July 08 2018, @09:25PM
The same holds for tweets, I'm just sayin'...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 09 2018, @12:18AM (1 child)
Imagine a world without email. How could you had raised hell about Hillary's?
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Monday July 09 2018, @01:34AM
Great example but those weren't her EMAILS. They were our Country's. They caused big problems for her campaign. And possibly HUGE problems for our Country!!!
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Monday July 09 2018, @08:55AM (2 children)
Why don't you just auto-attach a text/html MIME part that puts the text/plain in tags. That way forcing the user to read the E-mail as intended, and forcing the MUA to render is as intended (a lot of graphical MUA's wont render text/plain the way you as a mutt user might expect, but will if you'd provide a text/html with PRE tags).
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Monday July 09 2018, @09:00AM
Admittedly, this would of course make everything even worse. As the moment they reply your E-mail as HTML using Outlook, formatting will probably be really completely fucked up.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 09 2018, @10:19AM
Why don't all those companies that send a plain/text part stating I need to upgrade my email client instead auto-attach a a text/plain part with the content they want me to read? Formatting that is not an unsolved problem, text browsers such as lynx, elinks and w3m have been doing that for ages.
Perhaps it's time for a new MIME type: plain/stupid
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday July 09 2018, @09:06AM
You just edit a text buffer, with headers and MIME parts as shown, and send it. Of course, you can trivially arrange for the template to be prepopulated for all new messages.
Mutt is just a glorified GUI. Sure, it's implemented in ncurses, but using it is fundamentally no different than using a GUI mail client using only keyboard shortcuts and disabling image display. If you actually want something more Unix-y, I recommend using Emacs which you can customize and extend freely, not an ncurses GUI which requires hand-patching C for any interesting extensions.
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