[rsync]

I am a 20+ year (al)pine user (without gmail - I host my own mail server) and I have a fairly decent attachment/images/links setup ...

First, I use ripmime to dump every single attachment to a folder with dated naming - and so if there is an email in pine with an attachment I want to view, I just web browse a simple apache directory listing and click it. It's not sexy, but it's fast and efficient.

Second, I have a terminal PDF reader installed on my system and defined in alpine as a helper app for pdf files. So I cannot read word or excel right in alpine but I can read PDF docs. So that's nice and slick.

Finally, I never actually click links in alpine, but I defined lynx as a web viewer anyway because that allows me to get the very simple "do you want to view this http link ?" prompt from alpine ... which I always say NO to, but not until I have copied the full URL which they display for me. Then I just open it in a browser.

Fairly happy with this setup.

[YPCrumble]

I would love to read a blog post on this setup.

[AlexeyBrin]

It will be great if you could write a blog post about how to reproduce your setup.

[superdaniel]

Not trying to be snarky, but why not use something like Thunderbird (or whatever comes default on the OS of the machine that you're using) that will render out the HTML natively?

[luxpir]

If he's anything like me, a fellow mutt user, he cares more about speed and the text itself than pretty columns. It's surprising how little you miss html, particularly when breezing through email at a rate of knots. Plus system resources. So many resources.

[CaptSpify]

Not OP, but...

I find the inability to display HTML emails a feature, not a bug.

[rsync]

ding!

[semi-extrinsic]

Depending on what kind of Word documents you get, you might be interested in trying terminal doc(x) to plain text converters. Last I checked they were fairly good for simple things.

[_atc]

Also been using pine/alpine/re-alpine now for 16 years, and also not with gmail. Last I checked their IMAP wasn't fully IMAP. Fastmail FTW

[bsg75]

Using v2.20 [1] built from http://repo.or.cz/alpine.git I have Gmail working without much hassle using these docs: https://www.sjwrc.com/guides/alpine-and-gmail/ - namely just the IMAP paths.

[1] http://patches.freeiz.com/alpine/release/

[l_zzie]

Do you browse to html files on your attachment server? That's a pretty bad idea security-wise

[rsync]

"Do you browse to html files on your attachment server?"

No, I don't.