[codebook]

i recently switched to Thunderbird from Neomutt + Notmuch + afew + gmailieer combination. I was satisfied mutt's responsiveness, simplicity. But more and more emails are only for html based and its conversion to text is horrendous, I had to view Html at its own format. Then Thunderbird becomes a good candidate.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Similarly to sibling comment, I just set in mailcap:

    text/html;  elinks -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput

[codetrotter]

The really annoying thing is that some mail is multipart where the text/plain is just “sorry, your email client does not support html”. Yeah thanks a lot but it does, it’s just I have it set to prefer text/plain, because I don’t want to look at the html dump version unless I have to.

If those people had simply sent only text/html and not a useless text/plain that only says that kind of stuff then everything would have worked fine.

Stuff like that makes me want to quit using mutt, and no fault of mutt mind you.

But laziness has kept me to using mutt for reading my self hosted mail for many years now.

[IgorPartola]

I commend you for using “laziness” and “self hosted email” in the same sentence. I ran Mail-in-a-box a few years ago on a cheap VPS. Then I realized just how much I don’t want to do that. It was fun being my own email provider, even if it was only for a secondary account, but the risks definitely outweigh the benefits.

[jjav]

That's mildly annoying indeed, but I just press v and select the html version in those cases.

As you say, not mutt's fault.

[dm319]

Yes, and this is still usually quicker than firing up a full-fat email client (as I often have a web browser open anyway).

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I mean, yes it is annoying, but you hit v, select the HTML, and hit enter; it's not hard to work around, even if you shouldn't have to.

[codebook]

I also had that But the experience is way worse than reading email in html format. And these days, almost all emails are in html format with pretty basic text/plain in the form of multiformat.

That plain text doesn't have the intention of the composer, for instance, the inline image doesn't show inline and the email context says the figure above.

It is not that business form, but some ppl use colorful format to emphasize some text, which basically gives same text in the email, which makes the reader (in plain text) easily miss that part while skimming.

[jjav]

> It is not that business form, but some ppl use colorful format to emphasize some text, which basically gives same text in the email, which makes the reader (in plain text) easily miss that part while skimming.

I consider that a feature... On some email lists I'm on, there are endless complaints of how some people don't like some elses font/color/size etc. Using mutt I don't see any of that distraction, I just see the text. That's a win in my book.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I'll happily agree that it depends on the mail, and that for emails actually using graphics or fancy formatting, you really do probably need a real graphical interface. Personally, probably 90%+ of my mail can be reasonably rendered in plain text, so this works for most of it and then I use another client for the rest. But for the things it works for, mutt is amazing, so I use it when I can.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

I’ve had decent success using lynx to dump HTML to text.