I'm sure that there are organizations that want to market to you in HMTL but over here in the UK I can think of at least one very large government organization that has reset its MS Outlook to send and receive text only for bandwidth and security reasons.

I regularly receive emails from large corporations that clearly use plain text (unfortunately bandwidth advantage is probably annulled by the humungous disclaimers..)

I receive marketing emails that regret my decision to receive plain text only and direct me to a pretty online version of the message.

There are only two corporates I know that seem to have difficulty with plain text, one, unfortunately, is an engineering institution, the other is an MS heavy bank. (This is a fact rather than an anti-MS comment).

Further with the increasing use of mobile devices with smaller screen sizes, higher cost of 3G-type bandwidth and with the increasingly desire to avoid dodgy links in emails and the higher systems cost of HTML; plain text will only increase in popularity

So all in all, I'm unconvinced by "corporate pressure" for fancy email presentation.

Does anyone know a workaround for this problem? Has anyone successfully used an external HTML editor and launched it from inside KMail. This problem is REALLY annoying.

twelveeighty wrote:Has anyone successfully used an external HTML editor and launched it from inside KMail.

External HTML editor won't solve the matter - forwarding of HTML emails will still be broken. And as for sending HTML emails you can do it (to some extend) in KMail - in New Message window just go to Options -> Formatting (HTML).

@gerryg
Corporate pressure or not, fact is that now days most (if not all) email clients can handle HTML without problems, apart from KMail that is. People might not care about security related issues with HTML emails or the bandwidth usage for that matter - and they have the right to do so, regardless of what you or I think about it. Fact is that if they want to send those "fancy email" modern email client should meet their needs.

atrox wrote:I wonder will it be "fixed" in KMail2? I really love KDE products for their speed and customizeability, so I want NOT to migrate from KMail to Thunderbird

I checked out KMail in 4.6 beta 2 and unfortunately the situation seems to be exactly the same

atrox wrote:

atrox wrote:I wonder will it be "fixed" in KMail2? I really love KDE products for their speed and customizeability, so I want NOT to migrate from KMail to Thunderbird

I checked out KMail in 4.6 beta 2 and unfortunately the situation seems to be exactly the same

Yup. It's not a show-stopper for me, but it's a problem for enough people that I regard it as the single most serious flaw in the entire Kontact suite.

So any good alternatives to KMail? Are there any other mail application built on KDE tech?

atrox wrote:So any good alternatives to KMail? Are there any other mail application built on KDE tech?

I don't know of anything else that integrates well with the KDE desktop, but Evolution is a very good mail client. If I had a need to forward HTML it's what I'd be using.

yeah, it’s kind of ridiculous. nobody does anything about it since

1. many geeks prefer plain text mail. unfortunately these are the same people who develop kmail
2. in the bug report about this, some guy started to collect money for him to develop this FOR KDE3, and then more money to port it from kde3/trinity to kde4.

since almost nobody interested in this functionality uses kde 3 anymore, not much money is coming in. and since one developer already says he might, one day, possibly do this if he is payed, nobody wants to work on this.

I remember reading some article by some developer who said that they plan to use Webkit engine for rendering, instead of their own implementation and that would make keeping HTML-part intact when replying a lot easier etc.

But reading about the issue lately and seeing no developer supporting this, I don't know anymore.. maybe I had a wet dream or smth.

Isn't there a bug that we can vote on ?
This really needs to be fixed.

Please listen carefully. KMail as we have known it for a decade will not be further developed. The future for html mail is in KMail2. There is no point whatsoever in filing feature requests for the current KMail.

annew wrote:Please listen carefully. KMail as we have known it for a decade will not be further developed. The future for html mail is in KMail2. There is no point whatsoever in filing feature requests for the current KMail.

Fair enough, but unless I'm mistaken the KMail2 in the KDEPIM 4.6 beta doesn't forward HTML either. Like it or not, this is totally not in keeping with the realities of the modern world of email.

annew wrote:Please listen carefully. KMail as we have known it for a decade will not be further developed. The future for html mail is in KMail2. There is no point whatsoever in filing feature requests for the current KMail.

but kmail 2 can neither handle html mail afaik.

i simply want a kde-integrated email program which can cite html mails without breaking them and has a way to switch between html source code and wysiwyg (like thunderbird)

To date KMail2 has been concentrating on migration and stability. As far as I know it is intended that it will support html. Wait until KMail2 is released as stable - remember that it isn't, yet - then will be the time to record a feature request.

At the same time, do remember that thousands of Linux users do not want html mail. By all means make your request for off-list use, but don't push it down the throats of those of us that want plain text only.

annew wrote:
...do remember that thousands of Linux users do not want html mail. By all means make your request for off-list use, but don't push it down the throats of those of us that want plain text only.

Respectfully, Annew, it needs to be an option. Make it easy to turn off, make it opt-in, whatever... but this is THE biggest single flaw in the entire Kontact suite. This is coming from a guy who HATES html email. The simple fact is, you're closing off Kmail to an increasingly large percentage of users. I can tell you with authority that almost anyone that uses email extensively in any kind of business or academic setting has got to have this at least as an option.