Re: rmailmime.el

[Richard Stallman]

I see that rmailmime.el invokes metamail.el,
and metamail seems to feed the message to metamail.
But what does that actually do?

I tried it on one message which had a mime part with type text/plain
and another with type text/html.

What it did was create another window which showed something like
(end) -- but nothing else.  I think it runs vi.  That's not very
useful.  Running another Emacs wouldn't be very useful either.

I typed q and it said to type another character to proceed.  I typed a
space and that window went away, and the text/html stuff showed up
in BurningDog.  That makes sense.  But the behavior overall is
not convenient.

When all that is finished, I see a buffer called *metamail* which
seems to contain a processed version of the message header.  What is
the purpose of that?  Is there something useful I can do with it?

It seems like the right thing to do is make the contents of the mime
parts invisible, excepting the text/plain parts.  And then if you
click on one of the mime part headers followed by invisible contents,
it should display that mime part via metamail.

There could be commands such as C-c C-n and C-c C-p to move to the
next or previous mime part header.

I think it would be best not to pass any given mime part to metamail
unless/until the user goes to it and asks to see that part.

Would someone like to implement a mode like that?