I use mutt as my sole email client and I don't find HTML to be that much of an issue. The vast majority of the emails I actually want to receive are either text

I use mutt as my sole email client and I don't find HTML to be that much of an issue. The vast majority of the emails I actually want to receive are either text or multipart/alternative with a text option. Now of course, depending on the type of email you receive your mileage may vary. If I really end up having to read an HTML email those can be displayed "inline" using a text browser such as w3m. If the HTML is mostly text it works pretty well, for instance: https://svkt.org/~simias/mutt-html.png https://svkt.org/~simias/mutt-html.png If however it's image or css-heavy and doesn't work well in text-only form there's still the option to tell mutt to open the email in your web browser. Of course in this case there are security implications so it's probably best not to do it from untrusted sources.