Outlook-style quoting for Gnus and mu4e

Author contact information

Elias Martenson
Email: lokedhs@gmail.com

Summary

There is a significant number of people who wants to use Emacs for managing their email but work in organsisations that are using Outlook. One major feature (or, misfeature perhaps) is the way Outlook handles quoting. It includes the entire email chain at the bottom of the mail, with the reply on top. Users of Outlook also expects this chain to preserve all HTML formatting as well as any inlined images.

This package allows Emacs users to participate in such threads. It allows the user to write markup which is processed by Muse, and the content is then inserted into the existing HTML, resulting in emails blends perfectly into an Outlook thread.

Most of the work is performed by an external program written in Common Lisp. Building this program is the most complicated part of setting up this package. The section below will explain how to do this.

Installing

In emacs you will need muse. Open M-x package-list-packages and install it.

Install required packages:

sudo apt-get install sbcl libfixposix-dev

Install required packages (OS X):

brew install sbcl libfixposix

Install Quicklisp:

curl -O http://beta.quicklisp.org/quicklisp.lisp
sbcl --load quicklisp.lisp

In the sbcl console:

(quicklisp-quickstart:install)
(ql:add-to-init-file)
(quit)

Remove quicklisp.lisp, not needed any more.

Add to the end of ~/.sbclrc, edit the path to your setup:

(require :asdf)
(pushnew "/path/to/gnus-outlook-style/format-html-email/" asdf:*central-registry* :test #'equal)

Now you are ready to start compiling the format_quoted_email helper binary:

git clone https://github.com/lokedhs/gnus-outlook-style
cd gnus-outlook-style/format-html-email/
./make_binary.sh

You should be seeing downloading packages, compilation messages, and a fail message for format-html-email. Time to apply the patch to closure-html.

Go to the closure-html folder:

cd ~/quicklisp/dists/quicklisp/software/closure-html-...
patch -p1 < /path/to/gnus-outlook-style/closure-html.diff

Now go back and run make_binary.sh again:

cd /path/to/gnus-outlook-style/format-html-email/
./make_binary.sh

This should produce the format_quoted_email binary. Copy this to somewhere that is in your $PATH.

cp format_quoted_email ~/bin

Now add this to your emacs init file after gnus or mu4e, and customize the path to your setup:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/personal/vendor/gnus-outlook-style")
(setq outlook-style-format-helper-location "~/bin/format_quoted_mail")
(require 'outlook-style)

If you want <src> elements to be nicely formatted, you should also make sure that the htmlize library is installed. This can be downloaded from ELPA.

Kill and reload emacs:

emacsclient -e '(kill-emacs)'
emacs --daemon

Done, yay!

Now you are ready to use gnus-outlook-style.

Additional Configuration

Dynamic Selection of Posting Style

If you need to switch between posting with gnus-outlook-style and some other citation style (like one of the citation styles built-in to gnus), you just need to make sure the variable outlook-style-inhibit is bound and not-nil when the message buffer is created. Here's an example of how to do that using gnus-posting-styles and OneKey:

(defun my--set-style-traditional ()
  (interactive)
  (set (make-local-variable 'message-cite-reply-position) 'traditional)
  (setq-local 'outlook-style-inhibit t))

(defun my--set-style-above ()
  (interactive)
  (set (make-local-variable 'message-cite-reply-position) 'above)
  (setq-local 'outlook-style-inhibit t))

(setq my--reply-style-one-key-menu-alist
      '((("o" . "Outlook") . ignore)
        (("t" . "Traditional") . my--set-style-traditional)
        (("a" . "Above") . my--set-style-above)))

(setq gnus-posting-styles
      '((".*"
         (eval (one-key-menu "reply" my--reply-style-one-key-menu-alist t)))))

Signature

Due to the way gnus-outlook-style parses the message buffer, you currently can't use gnus-posting-styles with a signature element to specify your signature. However, you can always register a function with the outlook-style-init-hook to insert a signature "manually":

(defun my--outlook-style-init ()
  (save-excursion
    (message-goto-body)
    (insert "\n\n-John Doe\n")))

(add-hook 'outlook-style-init-hook my--outlook-style-init)

TODO: add instructions on how to actually edit emails in gnus and mu4e.

A note on the helper application

The helper application, format_quoted_email is written in Common Lisp. It should build on most CL implementations, although it has currently only been tested with SBCL.

Note: Currently the application depends on a fix to the CL library CLOSURE-HTML. Currently, this fix has not been included in this library's distribution, which is why the following list of steps include the application of a patch to the library prior to rebuilding the application.

fitzsim / gnus-outlook-style