On Thu, Apr 17, 2025 at 02:37:36PM +0200, Roger Price wrote: > I have been told by the elderly president of a club I belong to that when I > write on the club's mailing list, it must be in blue. I would like to do this > without using HTML. I use alpine to send and receive email : I tried adding > the > ASCII codes that produce colored text in a X terminal, for example the > command > echo -e "This is a test of \e[3;91m italic red \e[0m ", but they are ignored > in > an e-mail message body. > > Is there some way of producing colored text without using HTML ?
It's not the mail which has colour. It's the end user's "device" (in the most general sense, meaning the application, hardware, etc.) which puts colour on it. Based on this (in hindsight, as always, obvious) observation, you only have a chance if you use a transfer format willing to carry colour information and for which viewers are sufficiently widespread. This would suggest: - html - pdf - some Microsoft crap Now it depends on how vengeful you are: you might end up with RTF (out of categoty 3), or you might explain to your president that, when the mails are all blue, people with a monochrome monitor will be incapable to read them (perhaps they believe you). But if you intend to do your job as noiselessly as possible (why?), then HTML seems currently your least painful option. The escape sequences you mention above are targeted at terminals, and every decent terminal-oriented mail reader will filter them out, because they are a glaring security hole (as are HTML mails). Cheers -- t
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