html emails in mutt

I love minimal terminal based applications where ever I can use them. This means that I use mutt for viewing emails on my Linux system. One thing that is becoming more common is the use of HTML emails, which don’t display very well in the terminal. Instead of seeing the content as the sender would like you to, all you see is the HTML code.

By adding the following lines to your “.muttrc” config file

alternative_order text/plain text/html
auto_view text/html

and creating a new “.mailcap” file in your home directory with the following (change browsers Firefox and Lynx to your preferred applications)

text/html; /usr/bin/firefox %s >/dev/null 2>&1; needsterminal
text/html; lynx -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput

next time you open HTML emails in mutt the content is displayed in your browser.

Thanks to TerminalMage.net for the tip.