Top posting is the bane of internet mailing lists, the horrors of which are made clear in this example:
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
Luckily GNU Emacs provides tools to combat top-posting and other uglifications like badly wrapped lines in uglify.el packaged with the gnus email client.
I made a mutt.el emacs-lisp file with this in it (thanks to #emacs):
(defun deuglify ()
"Deuglify messages in batch mode"
(with-current-buffer
(get-buffer-create "*Article*")
(condition-case nil
(while t
(insert
(read-string "") "\n"))
(error))
(gnus-outlook-deuglify-article t)
(princ (buffer-string))
)
)
Which provides a function (deuglify) that will be invoked in Emacs’ batch mode, like so:
/usr/bin/emacs --batch --load ~/.emacs.d/elisp/mutt.el --eval '(deuglify)'
We can then use procmail which is used by a number of MTAs to create a recipe to pipe all of our messages through:
:0fbhw | /usr/bin/emacs --batch --load ~/.emacs.d/elisp/mutt.el --eval '(deuglify)'
This will pipe the message headers and body into Emacs and output a pretty email into your inbox you have defined.
