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by rsync 3405 days ago
This is important for (al)pine users ... when reading email in a terminal it is very useful to be able to open a PDF attachment as text and view it in the (terminal) mailtool ...

Yes, (al)pine is my mailtool in 2017.

3 comments

Also mutt, which I've switched back to recently. I've got a little Atom powered Chromebook converted to Linux that just does not like modern heavy webmail clients(even GMail when it was still running ChromeOS, and this is one still on the market, Acer CB3-131) so a combination of mutt, mbsync, and msmtp is a much nicer combo. Mutt is a terrific mail reader but its internal SMTP and IMAP handling can be a bit iffy, hence mbsync and msmtp.

Though I can generally open attachments just fine, this text rendering of PDFs would be useful for when I'm SSH'd into my home machine and reading stuff remotely(usually from work where I don't want to download my personal email).

Mutt + mbsync + msmtp is my setup too. I'm using Neomutt, since that's being actively maintained by a sizeable community of friendly people.
I use alpine in 2017.

It's easy to use, pluggable, and faster than any GUI I've touched.

As do I, because it's faster than browser based email and many GUI clients (like Thunderbird). I also like the fact that I can just copy across my .pinerc file to a new computer and my mail client is setup.

I had not considered the PDF issue. I just open them with an external application. The potential of reading them within Alpine hadn't occurred to me, but now it has, I want it!

Something like:

    application/pdf;pdftotxt %s /tmp/pdftxt && less /tmp/pdftxt
In your MAILCAP file?
No need to feel ashamed. I set up my own email server in 2016 and use mutt, squirrelmail, and iOS Mail very frequently.