Michael, this is a surprise!  Thank you very much.  I really appreciate it.

IMP 6.2.

Changes have been made in Git (master):

commit cb918129c3cd8ccc5c7ac9b8c18d5968940d4a98
Author: Michael M Slusarz <slusarz@horde.org>
Date:   Sun Mar 23 22:57:38 2014 -0600

     [mms] Add smiley data to message when added via the HTML editor 
(Request #13051).

  imp/docs/CHANGES    |    2 ++
  imp/lib/Compose.php |   32 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
  imp/package.xml     |    1 +
  3 files changed, 35 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

Maybe not important to some but in the business world, government, 
research, law offices, etc., they are.  They keep these messages 
forever and the messages must remain as they were when received for 
reference, etc..

That's too bad!

Anyway, I think this is a lost cause and we should close this ticket 
really.  I can't see a good solution.  Thanks for your suggestions 
though.

Emoticons are the only element (besides image insertion) that I am 
aware of.  And we only support the buttons/plugins defined in 
'ckeditor_buttons'.

  > The way I see it, once a message is sent, it should be viewable
Well... yes and no.  It really depends on the use case of the message. 
  A bulk message (think newsletter, or even a message CCd to many 
recipients) is actually much more efficient if sent with http links, 
since http is a much more efficient data retrieval protocol than MIME 
attachments.

And i think the whole "message should be viewable 10 years from now" 
isn't really that important.  We explicit give the option to link 
attachments, which most likely won't be available after a certain 
period of time.  Example: while it would be nice for my bookmarks from 
15 years ago to still work, the amount of effort required to route 
http requests to a new web layout is most likely way more effort than 
is reasonable for the payoff.
Do note that this ability has been removed from IMP 6.2.  The 
reasoning is that, now we have a way to explicitly indicate we want to 
add images to a message (drag/drop; adding via image menu()), any 
explicit http links in the message are there for a reason.  So images 
explicitly linked by an HTTP request will remain that way and will not 
be converted.

This raises another question.  Are there other content that needs to 
be available to the general public that may be included by CKEditor 
when a message is viewed?  I happen to notice the emoticons but could 
there be anything else such as javascript, css, etc. etc.?  There is a 
ton of content under the ckeditor directory for horde.

FANTASTIC.  I had no idea.  Thanks for the tip!

Yes, I mean messages from my system that is not open to the public.   
The way I see it, once a message is sent, it should be viewable 
without the need for my server to be up or online or available to the 
viewer.  Also, the message should be viewed as it was sent today, next 
month or 10 years from now.  Having external links just makes that 
nearly impossible.  This is why you provide the option to imbed images 
as attachments!
You are correct.  You can't have features without paying for the price 
somehow.
Thank you for that.
Totally agree.  Thanks again.

You can.  'ckeditor_buttons' preference.
This is not true.  Messages sent with emoticons from my system will be 
viewable to the recipient, since the emoticon URL is world accessible. 
  That may not be true in your setup, but this is not a limitation of 
ckeditor (or Horde/IMP for that matter).
Except without ckeditor, you wouldn't be able to do things like 
drag/drop images.

And you can remove most of the complexity with the ckeditor_buttons 
preference mentioned above.

What you probably meant to say is "This is one more reason why sending 
messages in HTML in my opinion adds more hassle than its worth."

I wish there was a way to turn these emoticons off then.  The way it 
is, every message that uses it will have missing parts when it is 
delivered.

This is one more reason why using ckeditor in my opinion adds more 
hassle than its worth.  I would vote for having a much simpler html 
editor that you as a developer can maintain than a more full featured 
one where you can't.  As it is now, any bugs in ckeditor (like the one 
I reported regarding cut/paste not working) will make IMP look bad 
from the user's point of view.

Thanks for looking into this.  I understand that a solution is not 
possible.  Perhaps the only way to address it for me would be to 
manually move these images elsewhere and using apache rewrite rules, 
redirect requests to them to their new location.  Being able to turn 
off emoticons would be best in my opinion.

This is going to be *MUCH* harder than expected.  Ckeditor doesn't 
provide any hook to catch the addition of smileys, and we are going to 
have to do manual URL deconstruction/parsing at send-time to get this 
information.

Please provide a configuration setting similar to 
$conf[compose][convert_to_related] that allows IMP to include 
emoticons and any other images that it adds as part of message editing 
as MIME parts within the message rather than http references back to 
the IMP server.  This particularly causes a problem where a server is 
for many reasons not available to the mail recipient and therefore, 
the images cannot be downloaded when the message is viewed.

Thanks.
Aria