Re: metamail now misbehaving
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-user@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.
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