On Tue, 27 Oct 2020, at 21:04, Dan Ritter wrote: > - Use a good MUA and resign yourself to occasionally sending an > email to a browser. Despite your protestations of "logging > in", having a browser display your email requires no such > thing. The MUA saves the email to a file, then hands the file > to the browser to open it.
If the email also contained umpteen attachments each of which was (typically) an image, then the MUA needs to create a folder containing the html and the unpacked images. Depending on the way that the html referred to those images, the MUA also needs to revise the form of the image references inside the written-out html so that the written-out image files can be found by the browser when it processes the html. It's not quite as simple as you make out, especially if the code has to work on multiple platforms / file systems. In my experience such mails are usually forwarded jokes etc, and another problem is that they often contain forwards of forwards of forwards (etc) with nested sets of attachments (as a succession of technically naive users just forward the mail they received, rather than creating a new original one with just once set of contents). Some email clients also don't assign separate names to the attachments, so when they get written out the MUA has to invent a name sequence (and of course modify the html accordingly). -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.