Mutt is a powerful, character-cell based MUA. It may even be more powerful than MH, even if it weren't for the fact that mutt is maintained, and MH is apparently not.

  • A list of methods
    1. Mutt can be set up to display html e-mail reasonably well. The following are steps that should allow you to do so.
      1. Create ~/bin/html2txt, make sure it is executable, and on your $PATH. I chose links, because of its numbered links feature, but any of these are probably fine. This html2txt script looks like:
          		#!/bin/sh
          
          		# for mutt to view html e-mails
          
          		#where html2txt is a shell script that performs the conversion, e.g. by
          		#calling
          
          		links -html-numbered-links 1 -html-images 1 -dump "file://$@" 
          
          		#or
          		#
          		#lynx -force_html -dump "$@"
          		#
          		#or
          		#
          		#w3m -T text/html -F -dump "$@"
          		
      2. Modify your ~/.muttrc to contain:
          		# for viewing html e-mails inside mutt.  See also .mailcap
          		auto_view text/html
          		alternative_order text/enriched text/plain text text/html
          		
      3. Modify your ~/.mailcap to contain:
          		# for mutt to view html e-mails
          		text/html;html2txt %s; copiousoutput
          		
      4. You'll probably have to exit mutt and restart it.
      5. Now ask yourself "Why doesn't mutt do this out of the box?" Why do you have to jump through hoops? This isn't the 1970's.
    2. Search freshmeat for "mime to text". There's a small handful of programs that will convert mime to a text representation. Honorable mention goes to rpmhshow, which even converts jpeg's to a text representation!
    3. If you are using Apple Mail, and you receive an HTML table that doesn't display well, try clicking "view in browser" or something like that.
    4. If you are using Mulberry, and you receive an HTML table that doesn't display well, "control-click in the body of a formatted message and select "View Part". The message will display in a browser window, usually pretty well." (From Scott Menter)



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    Timestamp: 2024-11-14 15:22:26 PST

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