On 2020-03-25 20:03, Russell L. Harris wrote:
At the moment I am running neo-mutt on Debian 9. Once or twice a day I receive a HTML message, typically with a PDF file as an attachment. Picking out and viewing the links and attachments always is a hassle, and sometimes is rather difficult. Rather than hassle with mutt, I hoped to install an auxiliary mail client with GUI (such as Thunderbird) with which I could open such messages, view the links, and print the attachments. But Thunderbird is demanding the URLs of POP and SMPT servers, and I do not wish to allow Thunderbird to mess around with my mail, other than viewing specific messages. One approach would be to get a mail account strictly for this purpose, and set up a complete Thunderbird mail system using that account. But is there a better solution? RLH
If you configure all your e-mail clients to leave the messages on the server, you should be able to access the same e-mail server account from multiple clients. Current clients using IMAP seem to work this way (Thunderbird, Apple Mail).
When I used POP (POP3?) clients in the past (Outlook Express, Outlook, Thunderbird), the clients defaulted to downloading and removing messages from the server. I don't know if that was part of POP or a setting in the client. If the latter, you might be able to tune your POP clients to leave the messages on the server. This would enable access from multiple clients.
A related issue is encryption on the incoming and outgoing connections. Current clients and servers seem to use some variant of TLS for both.
David