Outlook-style quoting for Gnus

[Elias Mårtenson]

Note: this is a re-send. The first copy was sent at the same time that
I joined the mailing list and it didn't seem to be delivered. I
apologise in advance in case you see multiple copies of this mail.

At work I suffer from a problem that I suppose is not unique in the
world: Being in an organisation that exclusively uses Outlook. For
quite some time I suffered using Thunderbird, but I don't think I have
to tell anyone here that that is not an ideal situation. Especially
when most of the corporate communication is happening through email.

I tried using Gnus, but I realised quickly that the everybody expects
the replies to conform to the (yes, quite horrible) citation style of
Outlook. This means that emails are HTML, and that the entire email
chain prior is included in each mail. This includes preserved
formatting and images. I also realised that Gnus had no way to provide
this.

This needed a solution. If one doesn't exist: Make one.

So, I did. Me and a colleague have been using this for a while now,
and it works quite effectively. So I felt it's time to ask the larger
community if this this is something that anyone else has worked on
addressing, and whether or not this is something that other people may
also have a need for.

Currently, apart from handling the Outlook-style quoting, with all its
horrible quirks, it also uses Muse for marking up the text that you
write. I have been thinking of switching this to Org instead. Doing so
should be fairly simple, as most of the infrastructure is already in
place.

Anyway, here's the code if anyone is interested in taking a look:

https://github.com/lokedhs/gnus-outlook-style

The biggest problem right now for anyone who would like to try this is
that it requires an external helper application. I needed to do it
that way since there is no stable (and forgiving) HTML parser in
Elisp. Adding to this is the fact that even the one in CL
(closure-html) also barfs on the mess that Outlook spews out, so I had
to patch it. The patch is included in my distribution, but it's not
yet part of the standard distribution.

Anyway, have fun (wait, no. Outlook is involved, so fun is not part of
it). Please take a look if you're interested. :-)

Regards,
Elias