[SOLVED] MUTT: autoview html (but not plain text) with lynx

Trilby · 2012-06-29 20:07:05

I'm sure I'm missing something simple, but I cannot get these wiki instructions to work properly.

I followed the instructions for lynx and in one sense it works perfectly: with the mailcap and the autoview entry I can view html email in mutt just as expected. Unfortunately EVERY email, even plain text, gets parsed through lynx for display. I can easily toggle this on or off by commenting/uncommenting the autoview line of my muttrc. I cannot, however, get it to use lynx only for html emails while displaying text-only emails normally.

Does anyone else have this working the way (I think) it should work?

Edit: in case no solution is forthcoming and others get frustrated by this too, I've found w3m to be much better than lynx. I have the same problem with w3m as lynx, but w3m does not mangle text-only emails the way lynx does and they are still quite readable. I still hope there is a solution to the underlying problem however.

Edit2: for those also trying this, while lynx mangled the line length and formatting of text only emails, it actually does better (IMHO) with html than w3m did, so I'm happy to have this working with lynx now.

Last edited by Trilby (2012-06-29 20:45:52)

skanky · 2012-06-29 20:20:27

I've not tried that trick, but my html mailcap entry is only used for html. Are your plain text emails incorrectly marked as text/html in the mime header? That's what should determine which mailcap entry gets used.

If an email has the two (or more) entries as say text/plain and text/html mutt may choose the one you don't want. I have this setting to get round that:

alternative_order text/enriched text/plain text/html text

Not sure why I have enriched first,..but it's not annoyed me yet.

It might also be worth posting the full mailcap file.

Trilby · 2012-06-29 20:39:20

Yup, that did it, thanks.

After some testing it seems my universities mail server does some sort of duplication to every email sent so that a plain text is always sent as plain-text and text/html as alternatives.

The alternative_order has it working perfectly, but to satisfy my curiosity I removed that option again and looked through my mail to find something that did not come from a university contact, and sure enough it displayed properly with or without the alternative_order setting.

So you were right on about the problem and the solution. Thanks. I think I'll add this to the wiki section as an optional setting.

skanky · 2012-06-29 20:42:28

Most mail I get tends to have both plain and html rendering. Now I think of it, that's why I ended up adding this setting all those years ago (before I came to Arch, IIRC).

Arch Linux

#1 2012-06-29 20:07:05

[SOLVED] MUTT: autoview html (but not plain text) with lynx

#2 2012-06-29 20:20:27

Re: [SOLVED] MUTT: autoview html (but not plain text) with lynx

#3 2012-06-29 20:39:20

Re: [SOLVED] MUTT: autoview html (but not plain text) with lynx

#4 2012-06-29 20:42:28

Re: [SOLVED] MUTT: autoview html (but not plain text) with lynx

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