[Alpine-info] ingesting .msg files

[Lucio Chiappetti via Alpine-info]

On Mon, 9 Feb 2026, Eduardo Chappa via Alpine-info wrote:


> On Mon, 9 Feb 2026, Hisashi T Fujinaka wrote:

>

>> I used to use demime or something. Nowadays there's so much html 

>> nonsense



> With that, I can read any html message I want, which for me is the

> exception, not the rule.


I share your discomfort with html mail, specially for the case where 
a message contains two copies, a plain text one and an html "duplicate",
and secondarlly for those newsletters which send a single html part 
without linefeeds.

So I have a set of procmail rules

- one default rule using an external shell script will strip the the html
   part so that in my inbox I see only the plain text (and I archive only
   such version). The script also strips top posting stuff.
   For safety the original untouched message is saved to a temporary
   folder (cycles weekly), so I can get at it if something goes wrong

- a few rules BEFORE that will avoid such processing for a few addresses
   which send legitimate html mail (usually newsletters with graphics,
   eoither as a single well formatted html part, or a linefeed-less obe


> When I receive an HTML message that I am interested in reading, I pass it

> to a web browser for display.


In order to do that (usually for the newsletters above, I normally do as
follows.

- in the message do V (for view attachments)
- then S to save the html as a file in s specific directory
   (usually temp/AAAB/temp.html, with Overwrite)

- then in my browser I go to such directory and view it

(note that in my case the machine where I sit, my home PC, is not the 
machine where mail arrives (a work PC). I usually run alpine in an ssh 
terminal from home to work. So  temp/AAAB is on the work machine (which
has an apache server), while the browser is on the home machine.

But it could work even if all would be on a single PC, and even if it has 
no apache server (I actually I have one at home though local), using 
file"// insetad of hhtp:// on the browser.