Sending emails in Pine (Alpine) with underline, emphasis

Question

I would like to send emails via Pine (Alpine) but with correct style usage, for instance, underlining book names, etc. How can I create emails in Pine using underline, emphasis, etc. (This can include a variety of receivers of such emails ranging from other Pine users to Outlook to Gmail).

Answer 1

Pine/Alpine does not support composing messages in HTML (which is the only rich text format supported for email nowadays).

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In plain-text media (IRC, non-HTML email), it is very common to use _ and * to denote emphasis. _word_ can be interpreted as either italic or underlined, and *word* usually means bold text. Sometimes, /word/ is used for italics.

Some mail readers even detect such markup and format text accordingly; an example is Thunderbird. This website does so too.