notmuch-emacs: forward messages inline

[Matthew Lear]

Hi Daniel,

> On 5 Nov 2015, at 21:42, Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg at fifthhorseman.net> wrote:
>> On Fri 2015-11-06 04:51:53 +0900, Matthew Lear wrote:
>> Are there any recommended ways to selectively forward an email as
>> inline with notmuch-emacs rather than as an RFC822 attachment, eg have
>> a new shortcut key that can be used for this purpose in addition to f?
>> I have toggled one of the mml configuration variables (I forget
>> exactly what it was) which switched the forwarding method to inline
>> (ACAICT this also removed the ability of being able to forward as
>> RFC822), but it also included various header information in the body
>> of the email. Not good.
> 
> I suppose you could reply to the message (r) and just change the
> addresses, which would include the previous message "inline".  If you
> don't like that it leaks the previous message-id in the In-Reply-To and
> References headers, you can just kill them from the buffer manually.

I guess that's one way, but it's a bit of a faff. Unless it was possible to wrap
it all up in lisp, I don't really think it's a good option.

> But can i ask why you'd want this?  forwarded messages as RFC 822
> attachments are significantly more sane for any MUA to deal with.

No arguments on the 'being sane' front, although I have seen
notmuch-emacs fail to correctly formulate an RFC822 attachment of the
original email message a few times. I suspect this was due to MS Outlook
formatting but can't be sure, though. My main use of notmuch is at work
where I have to handle large amounts of email such as bug notifications from
a couple of systems, messages to/from lists, auto generated stuff for tracking,
plus the usual reams of corporate email from teams and colleagues. Notmuch
allows me to handle this fantastically. A common use case of forwarding
messages inline is to take an email already received, and send it onto
colleagues. It's not uncommon for this to initiate a new thread of conversation
and other people could be added to the thread as appropriate. If I were to
forward a message I received as an RFC822 attachment, in order for the
conversation to be coherent and contained in the text when other people were
added to the thread, the email containing my attachment would need to be
forwarded to (additional) recipients because 'replying to all' and including new
recipients wouldn't contain the original message. As I see it, to be able to
forward and include people starting a new thread based on the forwarded
message, it needs to be inline. Make sense?
--  Matt