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Comment by kingosticks | Hacker News Reader

Inline images are incredibly helpful when explaining things via email, which can be hard enough as it is. Imagine a textbook where all the diagrams were at the end of the chapter and you had to keep flicking between pages to refer to them. You have to imagine that as it doesn't exist, for some reason.

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My colleague makes these images-with-commentary emails every week. For when I need to view those, I hit `H` in mutt, which opens the email in my web browser.

It's all quite painless really.

https://github.com/jezen/dotfiles/blob/master/.mutt/muttrc#L...

That does sound like a possible work-around, I might try moving to mutt again. But what about when you want to create one of those yourself? Or to reply inline to parts of theirs? How is that handled, do you write HTML?

One of the few reasons I have to mess around with NoMachine etc is for email, if I could get it in a terminal over ssh that'd be great. I did try a few years ago and after wasting a lot of time sorting the config, the lack of good reading experience for rich content emails was enough for me to dump the whole thing.

I've started playing with building a drop-in replacement for msmtp that converts markdown to a multipart email, but honestly I never actually need to create these kinds of emails, so that little project is on the back-burner.

The extra step and use of an external program is pretty inelegant, IMO, when there exist clients that will just show you the damn image in the mail window.

> Imagine a textbook where all the diagrams were at the end of the chapter and you had to keep flicking between pages to refer to them. You have to imagine that as it doesn't exist, for some reason.

I don't know if you are joking, but this was not uncommon for quite some time. It used to be that color printing was much more expensive than black and white. Text books often only had a few pages with illustrations and images in color. The color printed sheets were added last so they ended up exactly in the middle of the book.

I should have said:

> it doesn't exist anymore

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