4 ms·

I can't believe I never thought of this! Brilliant idea. Now just to solve the viewing problem...

contingencies 10y ago
The reverse should work for simple HTML. For complex HTML to plain text try https://www.google.com/search?q=lynx+convert+html+text https://www.google.com/search?q=lynx+convert+html+text .. most text browsers can do a reasonable job of it.
- Steltek 10y ago
  Using lynx (or elinks, in my case) to view HTML email in mutt is the historical solution. I think the desire here is for a reversible transformation. E.g. I can receive an HTML email, view it as Markdown, reply using Markdown, and then send an HTML email in reply. Unfortunately, I think foreign email clients would mangle the HTML just enough to stop this from working. You'd have to start implementing a tag soup type parser to coax incoming mail into something intelligible.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    We're almost at that stage with HTML already. I'm thinking that a multi-pass parser: 1. Is this sane HTML5 markup? I'll eat that. 2. Is this a borked-but-manageable variant? Strip the cruft. 3. Is this Beyond All Hope? Just dump it as ASCII. It'll be blockquoted in reply. HTML is no longer a peresistent, stable, or universal interchange format.
nextos 10y ago
Well you can use pandoc too or w3m.
tmerse 10y ago
For some HTML mails, it is sufficient to use a mailcap file in combination with lynx or w3m: # ~/.mutt/mailcap text/html; w3m -I %{charset} -T text/html; copiousoutput; # ~/.muttrc alternative_order text/plain text/enriched text/html # save html for last auto_view text/html If you want the full HTML experience, you can use this script [1], which uses python (there also is an older bash version) to convert the mail into standalone html to be viewed inside a browser. # ~/.muttrc macro index,pager M "<enter-command>unset resolve<enter><clear-flag>N<enter-command>set resolve<enter><pipe-message>viewhtmlmail\n" "View HTML in browser" 1: https://github.com/akkana/scripts/blob/master/viewhtmlmail https://github.com/akkana/scripts/blob/master/viewhtmlmail

The reverse should work for simple HTML. For complex HTML to plain text try https://www.google.com/search?q=lynx+convert+html+text https://www.google.com/search?q=lynx+convert+html+text .. most text browsers can do a reasonable job of it.

Steltek 10y ago
Using lynx (or elinks, in my case) to view HTML email in mutt is the historical solution. I think the desire here is for a reversible transformation. E.g. I can receive an HTML email, view it as Markdown, reply using Markdown, and then send an HTML email in reply. Unfortunately, I think foreign email clients would mangle the HTML just enough to stop this from working. You'd have to start implementing a tag soup type parser to coax incoming mail into something intelligible.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  We're almost at that stage with HTML already. I'm thinking that a multi-pass parser: 1. Is this sane HTML5 markup? I'll eat that. 2. Is this a borked-but-manageable variant? Strip the cruft. 3. Is this Beyond All Hope? Just dump it as ASCII. It'll be blockquoted in reply. HTML is no longer a peresistent, stable, or universal interchange format.

nextos 10y ago

Well you can use pandoc too or w3m.

tmerse 10y ago

For some HTML mails, it is sufficient to use a mailcap file in combination with lynx or w3m: # ~/.mutt/mailcap text/html; w3m -I %{charset} -T text/html; copiousoutput; # ~/.muttrc alternative_order text/plain text/enriched text/html # save html for last auto_view text/html If you want the full HTML experience, you can use this script [1], which uses python (there also is an older bash version) to convert the mail into standalone html to be viewed inside a browser. # ~/.muttrc macro index,pager M "<enter-command>unset resolve<enter><clear-flag>N<enter-command>set resolve<enter><pipe-message>viewhtmlmail\n" "View HTML in browser" 1: https://github.com/akkana/scripts/blob/master/viewhtmlmail https://github.com/akkana/scripts/blob/master/viewhtmlmail