[stephenr]

I've always thought native handling of markdown for email would be pretty cool.

The MUA could strip out any HTML embedded in the actual markdown, render to HTML locally (for display) and you have nice formatting without the risks or cruft of email HTML.

And of course if you choose to view in text only mode, you don't actually lose any semantic meaning.

[zwp]

Huh, looks like text/markdown email is coming slowly:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/25812177

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7763

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7764

(March 2016)

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13176743

[stephenr]

The RFC's are just about defining the Media Type 'text/markdown' aren't they?

Just because they used to be called MIME types and were designed for email, I wouldn't treat those RFC's as being about email support specifically.

[zwp]

Sure, it could be used elsewhere. OTOH 7763 calls out email as a use case three times and in section 5 Examples "email attachment" is the only example.

[proactivesvcs]

In plain text, Thunderbird recognises * and / as bold and italic, which sometimes produces interesting results for badly-formatted multi-part emails.