Monday, July 27, 2015

Forwarding HTML e-mails on Android

I was looking at blogging platforms again.  A big feature for me that used to be very hard to find is now supported by all of the major blogging platforms I looked at: the ability to post via e-mail.  Even better, also formerly elusive, is the ability to change the e-mail address used to post the messages, in case the old address got hacked or whatever.  They all had that as well.  However, I'm finding it difficult to post HTML e-mails to the blogs from my Android phone and have them show up properly.

The native clients I'm using are K-9 Mail, Google Inbox, and Gmail.  When I get an HTML e-mail that I want to post to my blog, I forward it.  Currently, I'm using Blogger for this since that workflow seems to reliably get the HTML up on my blog without any massaging on my part.  I tried posting an HTML e-mail to WordPress in this manner, by forwarding it with Inbox, and the post was empty.  I tried it with Gmail and got the same result.  However, when I post using Gmail on a Web browser -- both Chrome for desktop and Chrome for mobile -- the message appear properly on WordPress.

I'm guessing that the native clients are not actually sending the message's assets (images, at least), but only the IMG tags, leaving it up to the recipient's client to load the assets.

My first question is, is this guess correct?  My second question is, why do native clients behave this way?  Is it a question of bandwidth, i.e., the cost of sending the assets themselves versus sending the IMG tags?  My third question is, how can I get around this with a native Android client?  Now that I know I can do this with Gmail on mobile Chrome, no problem, but it would still be nice to be able to do this offline.

Update

To elaborate, when I use Inbox from desktop Chrome, forwarding the message as-is to both Tumblr and WordPress produces an empty message.  Blogger posts the message in full.  Only when I remove the delimiter between the forwarded message and the body of the message do WordPress and Tumblr post the message.  Even then, Tumblr seems to filter out all of the HTML assets; WordPress posts the message fully and intact.