On, Sun, 9 Jul 2017 14:12:07 -0400, I wrote: >> I run Wheezy with fvwm (window manager). I prefer to use the command line >> when possible, and for mail I have bsd-mailx with sendmail. To read e-mails >> sent as HTML or base64, I use metamail (which was last distributed with Etch, >> I think), as follows: >> ... >> Coincindent with my upgrade to firefox-esr 52, metamail no longer quite >> works. If no firefox window is up, it does succeed. But if (as usual) a >> firefox window already exists, it opens a new firefox tab with the error >> "Firefox can't find the file at /tmp/Mu6MRTf". And there is in fact no such >> tmp file.
On, Mon, 10 Jul 2017 04:01:28 +0200 =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=C1ngel?= <debian-u...@debian.16bits.net> replied: > I suspect metamail launches the browser and, after the launched program > is closed, automatically deletes the temporary file. > The problem is that when a window already exists, control is transfered > to that window, and the original program is closed, thus leading to a > race condition between the deletion of the temporary file and its > loading by the firefox process. > > First option would be looking for a way not to have metamail remove the > file, leaving the file to be cleaned up later (you may want to dedicate > a subfolder for metamail temp files). > > Another option would be to replace the call to /usr/bin/iceweasel with a > wrapper that launches iceweasel and waits a few seconds, which would > hopefully make the browser win the race. It's not a particularly elegant > solution (the race is still there, after all), but is probably good > enough for you. A clever idea. Option 2 was quick and successful. In ~/.mailcap, I changed text/html; /usr/bin/iceweasel '%s'; description=HTML Text; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; nametemplate=%s.html to text/html; /usr/bin/iceweasel '%s'\; sleep 1; description=HTML Text; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; nametemplate=%s.html and now the tmp file hangs around long enough. Thanks also to David Wright for the suggestions on setting up mutt. I may get to that, since bsd-mailx + metamail still has some real limitations.