Re: Email Rendering Utility

Omar Polo <op@omarpolo.com> writes:

> On 2024/10/17 11:56:31 -0500, "Robert B. Carleton" <rbc@rbcarleton.net> wrote:
>> I've been hunting around for some kind of utility that I can use from
>> mail(1) that can be fed emails on the stdin and convert MIME, TNEF,
>> HTML, and the like into text. I haven't had much luck finding that kind
>> of thing. I'm familiar with mpack from packages, but I'm looking for
>> something that can handle a wider range of input. Any suggestions?
>
> There's (was?) someone on tech@ trying to fiddle with mail(1) to handle
> MIME and whatnot, not sure if they got to the part of decoding too.
> There are also some thirdy part version of mail(1) that I *believe*
> handle MIME (both in composing and when reading.)
>
> Otherwise, I can suggest mshow(1) from the mblaze package. It can read
> a mail from standard input and render it nicely, as well as allowing you
> to extract one of its parts (either the attachments or inline). You
> could run it as
>
> $ mail
> [...select a mail...]
> & !rm mail
> & s mail
> & !mshow ./mail
> [...contents of the mail nicely formatted...]
> & !mshow -t ./mail
> [...list MIME parts...]
> & !mshow -x ./mail N
> [extracted part N from ./mail]
>
> (I'm not an heavy user of mail(1) so probably there's a better way to do
> this.)
>
> At this point however switching away from mail(1) and embracing mblaze
> is probably easier ;-)
>
> HTH

Using "| mshow -" works for most things I've tried so far. Using mail(1)
is mostly a backup to using Emacs Rmail. I'm not sure why, but the TUI
for Rmail can be a little slow when I ssh in and run it. Sometimes I use
mail(1) to take a quicker look at mail when I'm on the road.