Irreal

As you know, Emacs can display most of the common image formats such as SVG, JPEG, PNG, and GIF but what about formats, such as webp, that aren’t handled natively by Emacs? Álvaro Ramírez has another quickie that tells us how to do it.

It turns out to be simple, especially if you already have ImageMagick or one of a couple of other external image converters already on your system, it’s just a matter of telling Emacs to use the external image converter. Here’s the magic spell:

(setq image-use-external-converter t)

If you don’t already have ImageMagick installed, you might find it a worthwhile addition to your system. Previously, Ramírez considered the problem of combining a series of JPEGs into a single PDF and told us how to do that. His solution was in the context of his dwim-shell-command framework but it’s just a simple call to ImageMagick’s convert command. Many of his simple DWIM Emacs shell functions make use of ImageMagick so you might also want to consider adding dwim-shell-command to your Emacs configuration.

Ramírez has been blogging up a storm lately. Many of his posts offer actionable suggestions for solving the small but annoying problems that we all run into. If you haven’t already, you may want to add his feed to your RSS reader.

Just a quickie from Álvaro Ramírez. If you’re a Mu4e user and would like to have an email’s status shown as one or more icons instead of a series of comparatively opaque letters but don’t want to deal with all-the-icons, Ramírez has the answer for you.

It’s pretty simple. You choose the icons you want for each status indication—or simply copy Ramírez’s—and add a series of configuration items to your init.el. Those items are listed in Ramírez’s post so take a look if your interested in adding your own.

Sebastian Schulze has an interesting post on handling email To and From addresses. His procedure when supplying an Email address to, say, a Website such as some-site.com is to specify some-site.com@his-domain.com where his-domain.com is his domain. That allows him to apply appropriate filters and discover the source of spam.

In order for this to work, he needs two things:

1. His email provider must pass all email to him regardless of the user name.
2. He has to set the From address on any replies to some-site.com@his-domain.com.

The first item is generally doable if you have control of your domain, especially if you run your own email server. The second is a lot harder with almost every email client. Fortunately Schulze uses mu4e so it’s relatively easy with a bit of Elisp.

Actually, mu4e can almost handle this out-of-the-box. You can specify your email addresses and mu4e will respond with the appropriate From address. Schulze’s situation is a little more complicated. You could do it with vanilla mu4e but you’d have to constantly housekeep your mu4e configuration. Schulze’s solution takes care of everything automatically.

The Elisp required is minimal so it’s an easy solution providing you have your own domain and are using mu4e. My own—not as good—solution is to add specific “possibly spam” addresses to my mail server and use that for sites that are possible sources of spam. Schulze’s solution is clearly superior and worth emulating if you can.