One of the alot devs here,

Natively no. I have a fairly minor patch to alot that would make it work if the
type was text/markdown instead of text/plain.

I have another patch that makes this render correctly as markdown, but it breaks
lots of other text/plain emails that use characters in a way that they look like
markdown to cmark, but aren't actually markdown.

I think if we're going to have a message format we should use text/markdown or
text/commonmark, or text/x-(markdown|commonmark) rather than text/plain as the
format. While it's safe to read markdown as plain text (it was originally used
that way anyway), it's not safe to assume that all text is valid markdown.

elinks with "-dump-color-mode 1" did a pretty good job of formatting the html that
came out of cmark. I've attached that if anyone wants to see it.

Dylan

Quoting Daniel Kahn Gillmor (2017-08-10 21:41:52)
> Using `Content-Type: text/markdown`
> -----------------------------------
> 
> [Over on LWN, some discussion came up about rendering and generating
> text/markdown variants of e-mails](https://lwn.net/Articles/730277/)
> 
> This is similar to (but maybe simpler than) [a proposal that was
> discussed on the alot bug tracker earlier this
> year](https://github.com/pazz/alot/issues/1051).
> 
> I thought i'd drop this mail as a marker for the start of a longer
> discussion if anyone wants to try to take it further.
> 
> Next Steps
> ----------
> 
> I think this mail is (hopefully) actually composed correctly as
> text/markdown.
> 
> Does anyone's MUA render it properly?  Anyone want to post screenshots
> or other renderings?
> 
> Anyone have suggestions about message composition in markdown?
> 
>            --dkg
>