Web based email reply/quoting code available?

Question

I'd like to write a sort of mini-CRM system that will require interacting with emails from customers (many different systems). I'd like for it to be able to reply to their emails, and place the original email in a nice quoted reply format like other email apps.

This appears to be fairly easy when responding to an ASCII email, but how do we format an incoming HTML as quoted (ie, with the little bar down the left side to indicate it is quoted text)? Is there code already available to do this (preferably in Java)?

Or perhaps I am overthinking the problem...

Similar, but not quite the same question

Answer 1

The best solution in most cases is to convent the HTML email to text email (most emails are sent as both, so you can also just "prefer" text).

That said, if you must send the email as HTML, use the <blockquote> tag.

Answer 2

Just add the <blockquote> tag around the quoted piece of text. Maybe you can use a little CSS to style the quoted text, but I'm not sure of that works in all mail clients.