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Comment by nickcw | Hacker News Reader

I use Thunderbird as my main email client and I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it! I have a complicated email set up with 1000s of folders, and lots of mail accounts and filtering and by and large it does a great job.

I still use mutt when I really want an email powertool, but I can't use it as my daily email client any more (and haven't for years) now that HTML emails are so prevalent.

I use lots of plugins with Thunderbird (Copy Sent to Currrent, Enigmail, External Editor, Nostalgy, QuickFolders, Identity Chooser, Mail Redirect, ...) to try to bring back some of the functionality I'm used to with mutt and it works quite well now.

In recent months I find Thunderbird needs restarting once a day which is frustrating. It goes into some kind of internal loop processing an email and never returns. Probably a consequence of too many plugins!

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> I can't use [mutt] as my daily email client [...] now that HTML emails are so prevalent.

Whats the problem? What prevents you from viewing HTML emails as plain text? Often, that's more readable anyway.

Just put the following lines into your ~/.mailcap file:

    text/html; w3m $(grep -qi 'content-type.*charset' %s || echo '-I UTF-8') -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput

Feel free to skip the encoding fix, or to use another html-to-text converter than the text browser w3m.

It's certainly a better option than reading straight HTML, but it never quite does a complete job, and whenever I use mutt these days I routinely find myself having to kick in a mail client with full HTML support.

I like mutt, I used it for nearly a decade as my primary method for handling work emails, but unfortunately HTML email is the way of the world and it got to a point where mutt was hindering me (and others) more than it was aiding me.

It's been a long since I used mutt regularly, but I recall that I had my mailcap setup to pipe the HTML straight to FF when I couldn't read the text version. It worked pretty well as long as images weren't embedded in the email.

I personally use sup, but that's exactly how I did it. All you have to do is add a small hook, explained on a multitude of Mutt wiki pages. What issue did you have with images? I just have images set to xdg-open my picture viewer.

https://dev.mutt.org/doc/manual.html#mailcap

> unfortunately HTML email is the way of the world

Is it really? I still use mutt, and I have found 99% of the time, heavy HTML in e-mail means the mail is spam.

Occasionally an important e-mail (bank, etc) might contain a few HTML links, easy enough to visually parse. Real individual people IME send plain text, even non-techies.

Have you been using it in an enterprise scenario? Essentially the main email clients people use, Outlook etc, all default to HTML emails these days. Plus there is a big love of embedded images in signatures, different fonts around the text in their signatures.. all sorts of stuff. Roughly 90% of the direct email I receive in my inbox comes through in HTML form. Plain text is more often coming from mailing lists and automated systems that email me.

> Plus there is a big love of embedded images in signatures, different fonts around the text in their signatures.. all sorts of stuff.

IMO not displaying people's dumb signatures is a big advantage of text email clients. I switched to mu4e with w3m this year after about a decade of gmail use, and get and reply to a lot of HTML emails. I used the plain-text toggle in gmail all the time, and now w3m automatically does it for me. Never going back to webmail.

> Have you been using it in an enterprise scenario?

Yeah, sort of, an academic/hospital setting. Actually, I combined my academic and personal e-mail addresses into one at a custom domain, and forward other accounts to it, which annoys some colleagues.

Most people here use Outlook. Sometimes people might have a mailto: link in sig (which gives me a chuckle as it's pointless), but I don't ever remember encountering embedded images.

The biggest human offenders for sending HTML-heavy e-mails are university-wide announcements. In my mind, these fall closer to spam than ham, and what useful information is in them can usually be gained from the title.

> Roughly 90% of the direct email I receive in my inbox comes through in HTML form.

Same, because I haven't bothered to set up spam filtering. But of the e-mails I actually want to read, well below 5% do.

> Plain text is more often coming from mailing lists and automated systems that email me.

Fascinating. For me it is just the opposite. People don't usually seem to bother using HTML, consciously at least. But automated systems use it quite liberally.

> The biggest human offenders for sending HTML-heavy e-mails are university-wide announcements. In my mind, these fall closer to spam than ham, and what useful information is in them can usually be gained from the title.

If only! My alma mater always uses the subject "Important message from <University>". It never is.

I use the view message as plain text setting in Thunderbird for both my work and personal email and have never really had a problem with it.

Not the parent. One thing that prevents me from using text-only mail clients is that I have to read mail where in-line replies are distinguished from quoted content only by font color set in HTML. This means that I have to disable even Thunderbird's "Simple HTML" feature (which makes all text black).

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