Open HTML attachments externally in Mutt

mutt browser html lynx

14,241

You can do this with mutt's mime support.

In addition, you can use this with Autoview to denote two commands for viewing an attachment, one to be viewed automatically, the other to be viewed interactively from the attachment menu.

Essentially, you include two options in your mailcap file¹.

text/html; luakit '%s' &; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; needsterminal;
text/html; lynx -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput;

The first entry tests that X is running, and if it is, it hands the file to luakit. The default, however, is determined by the copiousoutput tag, so it will be rendered in Mutt by lynx.

You will need these options in your .muttrc:

auto_view text/html                                   # view HTML automatically
alternative_order text/plain text/enriched text/html  # save HTML for last

If you want to look at it in your browser, it is just a matter of hitting v to view the attached HTML and then m to send it to mailcap.

For convenience, I bind Enter to that function in muttrc:

bind attach <return>    view-mailcap

^{1. Note, I don't use lynx or luakit, so these options are indicative only.}
^{Shamelessly reproduced [from this blog post](https://jasonwryan.com/blog/2012/05/12/mutt/)...}

14,241

GeekPeek

Studied Physics, doing Software now.

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

GeekPeek almost 2 years
I recently managed to set up my mailcap so that Mutt can show HTML e-mails in the message window:
```
# ~/.mailcap
text/html; lynx -dump '%s' | more; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput;
```
which is automated by:
```
# ~/.muttrc
auto_view text/html
```
Although I think Lynx does a decent job on converting the HTML to text, sometimes this doesn't cut it and I would like to be able to open the HTML attachment in my web browser Luakit.

Is there a way to transparently do this? A good workflow for me would look like:
1. open mail (Lynx converts it)
2. see that it is too complicated for Lynx
3. press v
4. navigate to HTML attachment
5. press Enter to open the mail in Luakit.
- Admin almost 12 years
  
  This doesn't work for you ? text/html; luakit %s besides, auto_view doens't matter in this case, since html are actually attachments
Thor almost 12 years

If you want to avoid the needsterminal for luakit have a look a Gary Johnsons mutt-netscape script.
Thangamani J about 11 years

Does it really have to read text/html; text/html; luakit ... with the text/html repeated?
Shruti almost 10 years

Is there a way to do this while disabling the loading of external resources (for privacy reasons)?
jasonwryan almost 10 years

@a3nm That all depends on the settings in the browser you hand off to...
Shruti almost 10 years

@jasonwryan Yes... I'm looking for a way to invoke Firefox in a way that would disallow any external lookups.
jasonwryan almost 10 years

@a3nm I don't know, but I suspect there are privacy extensions for that.
Shruti almost 10 years

@jasonwryan Yes, but of course this only applies to mail loaded in mutt, not to all the browsing I do, so it isn't that easy to find something satisfactory...
reedstrm about 7 years

Invoking flirefox from the commandline with a specific special profile is easy - that way you could have a private profile specifically for mail reading.
jchook over 5 years

latest Wayback Machine snapshot of the mutt-netscape script
haxpor over 4 years

+1 This answer is the base I use. For mine, I just want to hook up with firefox, thus my first line in ~./.mailcap is text/html; [ $DISPLAY != "" ] && firefox %s &; needsterminal;, second line is the same, and no auto_view in muttrc as I prefer text-based.