Re: HTML mail + PDF attachments
On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 11:20:15AM -0500, David Wright wrote:
On Thu 26 Mar 2020 at 03:03:55 (+0000), 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.
It sounds, from some replies to this thread, as if these are not
attachments, but are references contained in the HTML.
Yes; the messages contain links to articles on the web, and some
messages have PDF attachments.
(I presume that you know about "v", to list attachments, and that
attachments can be email-type entities on which you can use "v"
again. List digests are like this.)
Yes; but URLview is not always successful in sorting out the links.
Sometimes the output of URLview is (to me) indecipherable; other
times, URLview works well. I think the problem is that the mail
client which cobbled together the message bungled the job; and I
suspect that a newsletter I receive several times a week from a cattle
raiser's association is generated by a mass mailer.
These defects obviously are not a problem for the M$Window$ crowd, and
I am hoping that Thunderbird is able to work around them.
I read most HTML-only emails, and the mixed ones where the text
version is seemingly unrelated to the HTML one, with "v" and then
"m" to activate a line from my mutt's mailcap_path:
text/html; /usr/bin/lynx -force-html -localhost -stdin
The "l" command in lynx will display the links in the HTML. On
security grounds, I generally prefer not to visit them under my
own username, so I paste them into a browser.
I dislike email written in HTML, but sometimes an important message is
written in HTML; in that event, I rather use a mail client such as
Thunderbird.
Another method I use, for example when shops send discount coupons in
HTML emails, is to type "v" in mutt and save only the HTML part in
/tmp/foo, then type Ctrl-o in a browser and open /tmp/foo.
I was not aware of that approach; thanks.
Note that, for real attachments, and HTML emails read by lynx as
above, nobody knows you've opened the email. Once you move to the
browser, then the sender knows. Side effects are not always obvious;
in the former case, banks might complain that you're not reading their
"important" missives, and companies might stop sending you their
marketing junk. In the latter case, there are obvious security implications.
I had not thought of that. Perhaps someone should devise a method
whereby a cookie automatically is replaced by a cookie which appears
valid but in which some vital aspect of the identity of the recipient
has been altered.
RLH
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