Daniel Bareiro wrote: > I was never very fond of sending emails in HTML format, but recently I > changed of job and when my boss saw I was using a company's signature > without the company logo, he asked me to put the pictures in the > signature. It seemed more a psychological than a real problem... And the psychology of it is producing the opposite problem of propagating the use of html for email which I find very undesirable. > Is there any way to use HTML signatures with Mutt? More than 10 years > that I use Mutt and I would not like having to change it just for > this. I tried using a signature file with HTML code, but after reviewing > the receipt of the message, HTML code is seen rather than rendering. No. You can't turn html on and off inline like that. What you will get is plain text with the html markup content as plain text. (If I am wrong, someone please jump in with an example.) You can only do it by turning on html email so that the recipient sees html email. The html part could have a logo but the plain text part can never have a logo. It isn't possible. The pushback you may get is that your boss probably always selects the html email and doesn't realize the bad nature of it. This would be standard with Gmail or Thunderbird or Outlook or other of those. Note that the Debian mailing list code of conduct explicitly forbids sending html mail to the mailing list. (See this page for it: http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct) Most technical mailing lists forbid html email. If you were to turn on html email when sending please do not turn it on for any public mailing list discussion. Let me spend a moment talking about mime mail encodings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME The mail standards allow you to send plain text email. That is email the way it has always been. Plain text. Just send the message. This is always good. The mime mail standards allow you to send mime encoded email. This is useful for signed messages such as mine. The mime standards allow you to send multipart alternative messages in the different mime sections. In multipart alternative both parts are supposed to be equivalent parts. In theory you could send plain text, html text, audio files, video files, image files or other all as equivalent parts of the same message. The recipient's MUA would then select the most appropriate part for display. In theory they might be listening to your voice read the message instead of seeing text on the page. But in practice this is only done with plain text and html text. Therefore the idea is that a sender can send a message as both plain text and as html text in the two separate parts. Then the recipient reading the message will display the part that is desired for their environment. In my environment this is always plain text. I try to avoid the need to fire up lynx, w3m, elinks, or links to read a mail message. I really, really try to avoid firing up Firefox or Chromium to read an email message. If you are following along so far you will realize that the only practical way to get an image in your email is if your entire email is formatted as html text. Your boss would then be seeing the html text version of the email and would get the logo. But that would alienate you from the sane portion of the world such as the technical mailing list forums. Additionally getting an image into html messages isn't a simple question either. You have a couple of choices. You can reference the image as a full external url link. http://www.example.com/image.png or some such. But most mail user agents will have concern for security. Those types of things are often used by spammers. The link may have identifying information or web-bugs in them to track you. That is all bad too. Therefore safe mailers will not display that content to you. At the least they will offer the choice to you for you to decide if you want to fetch those images from the net. Alternatively you can include the base64 encoded binary blob of the image inline in the email message. That avoids the problem of fetching the image from the network. However it bloats the email messages to be *HUGE*. Additionally it isn't entirely safe either. There have been many buffer overflow attacks against various image formats. I think you see that by now trying to do what your boss thinks is trivial is really just a very big step into the abyss. (Look for the discussion of Virgil earlier on this list. It isn't too often we get to discuss classical literature and modern computer theory in the same discussion thread. <grin>) Bob
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