[MlMt] When MailMate opens mail from a MailMate user

[Kee Hinckley]

On 13 Feb 2014, at 11:42, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:

> Just to be clear, I don't officially support the use of other Markdown 
> processors than the one “built in” :-) My main concern is how well 
> suited the Markdown text is to be a plain text body part of message. 
> The built-in processor handles paragraphs differently than most 
> Markdown processors do by default and there are also several other 
> [changes](https://github.com/freron/upskirt).
>
> It might be best if the “markdown” part of the content type is not 
> used when you generate HTML with a custom processor, but you would 
> probably need some way to tell MailMate to do that.

I understand. However given that all my documents are produced in 
MultiMarkdown, I don't want to lose features when I paste a document 
into email. Those aren't features I would normally use when just sending 
email to friends and family (tables, footnotes...), but they are ones I 
rely on in-house when writing documents.

Additionally, I need the ability to quote very bad HTML and preserve the 
embedded stylesheets. I haven't found any way to do that with Sundown, 
whereas MultiMarkdown turns a block of HTML prefixed with '> ' into HTML 
surrounded by a blockquote. If you add a "top-quote html reply" option 
to MailMate that puts the quoted HTML in a formatted pane, then that use 
case is taken care of, but right now MailMate out of the box isn't 
useable in a corporate Exchange environment. People reply on the fact 
that each reply contains all the formatted output of the previous 
conversations, and Outlook absolutely fails when it comes to inline 
replies. (Like, "rolls over and dies and screws up the output so you 
can't tell who said what" failure--it's horrendous.)

I have a preprocessor tweaking the input so that MultiMarkdown treats 
paragraphs similarly to Sundown. In particular, a line ending is treated 
as a line ending, and blank lines are treated as blank lines (actually, 
testing now, I see that Sundown ignores multiple blank lines). The only 
incompatibility I'm aware of is that Sundown also uses '~~~' for code 
fencing, whereas MultiMarkdown just uses '\`\`\`', so I handle that in 
my pre-processor as well. So long as I don't use something like tables 
or footnotes, I don't expect any issues with Sundown users replying to 
mail I send, and I've certainly not had any replying to them. And after 
all, that's one of the points of Markdown--that's readable even when 
it's _not_ formatted.

I will take a closer look at Sundown though and make sure my changes are 
in line with what it does. However, I'd seriously consider taking a look 
at MultiMarkdown as an alternative. It's very actively supported. It's 
builtin to everything from Scrivener to many markdown editors and 
viewers on the app store. It also has multiple document support (thus 
the name), which might be useful for viewing multiple messages at once. 
And I can attest that its performance in MailMate on my PowerBook (last 
generation of 17") is excellent.
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