>>>>> "Drew" == Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

> Bzzzzt - wrong question.  The question is NOT why we don't extend or
> generalize it to other Emacs email paraphernalia besides Gnus.
> The question is why we send this crap at all in plain-text messages?

> That such markup might be useful within Org mode or Gnus or even Emacs
> generally is no reason to expose it in plain-text mail.

> We discourage the use of HTML messages in GNU mailing lists.  But then
> Gnus/Org/Emacs goes and rolls its own simulacrum?  And then everyone
> who is not using Emacs for mail has the obligatory privilege of seeing
> the markup?

Although the comparison with HTML is probably not that fair, I do agree
that it's bad email practice. More importantly, I'm wondering how it
would not be better to leverage the existing RFC1341 that any decent
mailer should implement.

I mean, doing something like this (in gnus mml markup)
<#multipart type=alternative>
<#part type="text/plain" disposition=inline>
(defun plop ()
  nil)
<#/part>
<#part type="application/emacs-lisp" disposition=inline>
(defun plop ()
  nil)
<#/part>
<#/multipart>

that should be rendered as nicely depending on the mailer
capabilities. Like, with lisp fontification in Emacs (Gnus at least),
and in pure-text style in Gmail for example