Hello, Todd. On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 12:50:18 -0400, Todd Zullinger wrote: > José María Mateos wrote: > > On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 02:56:35PM +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > >> Some considerate organisation has been sending me MIME mails with > >> content in a text/html section and a wholly blank text/plain version. > >> What I see in mutt is the blank text/plain. Who on Earth thought a > >> blank text/plain section was somehow a good idea?
> [I know, I know, I'm answering a rhetorical question.] > I suspect one likely group would be the companies who depend > on advertising revenue. With HTML, they can stuff tracking > (whether direct like hidden pixels or indirect by changing > any URLs in the message to go through their servers. Those > things aren't very useful in text/plain, so shipping a blank > part just forces many folks to view the text/html. > Of course, sending just text/html would work better -- but > who knows what goes on in the minds of people willing to > perform shady tracking. :) Not me. > > I've seen a worse version of this: the text version and the html version are > > completely different. > > > > On my side, I have this: > > > > auto_view text/html > > folder-hook . 'unalternative_order *; alternative_order text/plain > > text/html' > > folder-hook boletines 'unalternative_order *; alternative_order text/html > > text/plain' > > > > So normally I look at the plain-text version, except in my folder > > "boletines" (Spanish for "newsletters"), where I default to HTML. > > > > In those cases where I'm in another folder and I need to look at the HTML > > content, I use this macro: > > > > macro index,pager ,b "<view-attachments>/html<enter><view-mailcap><exit>" > > "View first HTML attachment in browser" > > > > This opens the first available HTML attachmend (typically the message body) > > in my browser of choice (set up via ~/.mailcap). > An alternative (or addition) to the above is a message-hook: > message-hook ~A 'unalternative_order "*"; alternative_order text/enriched > text/plain text' > message-hook '~C "misbehaving-group@example\.com"' 'unalternative_order "*"; > alternative_order text/html' That will be my first ever mutt hook! It should certainly make sure I never get confused by this particular organisation again. > Replace ~C with ~f or other pattern as needed. You may > need to add something like: > auto_view text/html text/htm message/html message/htm > to the configuration as well, if you want them to open in > the mutt pager rather than in a browser. I think I've already got an auto_view for text/html. > I only view html via plain text, so I set auto_view as-needed. I view mail primarily on a Linux console, going into X when I need to look at things like PDF attachments. > -- > Todd -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany)
