Going GUI...er

[raf]

Vegard Svanberg wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I love Mutt.
> 
> However, I'm increasingly finding myself having to resort to various
> tricks to deal with HTML only emails (with picture attachments),
> calendar invites, and other oddities and awkward stuff people send.
> 
> My Holy Grail, which would be a native Mutt GUI client, I guess, doesn't
> seem to exist.
> 
> I don't know how I would survive with a regular GUI client like
> Thunderbird or Evolution. I've tried, but they all suck. Mutt's
> keybindings, search and navigation features are irreplaceable.
> 
> Currently I'm running Mutt from a machine which I ssh into from 5 other
> computers I use frequently (IMAP backend - self-hosted).
> 
> Suggestions? What does everyone else do?
> 
> -- 
> Vegard Svanberg <vegard at svanberg.no> [*Takapa at IRC (EFnet)]

I use mutt over ssh to read mail on a virtual machine
out there somewhere that is also my mail server, so I
can't really "display" anything therei (X11 not
installed). For most HTML emails, lynx is enough:

  .mutt.mailcap:
  text/html; lynx -dump %s; copiousoutput; description=HTML Message; nametemplate=%s.html

But when it's not, I have a macro that bounces the
email to a local IMAP account:

  .muttrc:
  macro index BR bbounce.raf.org at virt.raf.org\ny

and it's fetched by Thunderbird on my laptop. Once
read, I delete it in Thunderbird.

I concluded that that was the easiest thing to do in my
environment and it means that hardly any emails make it
to my actual laptop, only the ones I choose to allow
there, and they're always work-related ones that I've
already seen and know to be legitimate.

For other document attachments, I use various mailcap
filters to render things as text such as catdoc,
xls2csv, mutt.octet.filter and mutt.vcard.filter by
David A Pearson, vcalendar-filter by Martyn Smith etc.
The vcalendar-filter is very useful for me these days.

In my younger, more fanatical days, I wrote a tool
(textmail) to convert everything to plain text as it
arrived to keep my mailbox small. That wouldn't help
you. :-)

cheers,
raf