email gripe

[Mouse]

>> sending live URL's in the text that don't require a multi step copy
>> paste, or even save email edit, feed to lynx would be nice.

This is a client-side issue; there is no need to uglify the rest of the
email just because someone has an email reader that doesn't know what
to do with URLs.

>> Html email does that.

Only if the mail reader already knows how to handle such horrors.  And
there's no reason a GUI MUA can't turn URLs in text/plain text into
clickable links; I've seen it happen (over others' shoulders).

> There are some on this list (such as I) that do not use a graphical
> email client, but a text-mode email  client.

Me too.  Not that that is necessarily incompatible with HTML, though I
am not aware of any text MUAs that do anything with HTML but display it
like any other text.

But, send me mail that's HTML-only and it will be refused at SMTP time;
send me mail that's plain-and-HTML multipart and I will usually stop
reading when I see the HTML-uglified version.  (And yes, that means
right at the beginning if you put the HTML part first - which would be
a strange thing to do anyway, as multipart is defined to express sender
preference by ordering, with later parts more preferred.)

> [1]	To even look at a attached PDF, for example, I have to save it
> 	first, then download it to view it.

Somewhat similar here: quit the less(1) that's reading the text, run
mimesplit on the message file ("mimesplit `mmpath cur`" is the usual
incantation), step through and save the attachment when I get to it,
then start up gs or pdftotext or whatever on it - possibly after
copying it to my desktop machine, possibly running on the mail-reading
machine but displaying on my desktop (those two machines sit less than
a foot apart and are in the same broadcast domain on my house network).

> 	Yes, I do check my email on the server using a command line
> 	program

So do I: my routine mail-reading machine is the same machine that my MX
record points to, the machine that handles incoming mail.

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