Description of problem: When using mutt, viewing an html mail tries to open Mozilla to view it. This is very bad when using mutt over a low-speed ssh link. I find it completely absurd that a text-based mail editor would attempt to do such a thing. Had I wanted this I would have used Mozilla's mail editor. As an added irritation, when using mozilla in this way any html spam I open accidentally might run javascript, read cookies, or load images (and web bugs). So I could argue that using a web browser in this fashion is dangerous, confirms to spammers that my email address is valid, and, if paired with a malicious webpage that exploits a browser hole, could compromise my account. I understand that Mutt is using mailcap to choose a viewer for mime types it can't display, and mailcap is calling htmlview, which is starting Mozilla. I can see that mailcap is set up to use X software to display lots of things (images, html, postscript...). What's not at all clear to me is where I should make changes if I don't want this behavior. Should I reconfigure mutt, mailcap, or htmlview? I can change mailcap to use lynx instead but I'm not sure if this breaks any X software that uses mailcap. htmlview is, as far as I can tell, undocumented, so I'm not sure if there's any hope there. I'm not sure if I can get fine control within Muttrc/.muttrc over this behavior. I'd appreciate any advice on the correct way to fix this. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): mutt-1.4.1-1 mailcap-2.1.13-1 htmlview-2.0.0-10
Note also that using a browser to display html mail also effectively prevents replying to mail while quoting the original message. Using lynx -force_html -dump '%s' to convert to text allows me to reply to the original quoted message from within mutt.
As of now, I don't think we'll change this; unfortunately, the permutations of various text-mode web clients means that htmlview is really the only safe choice for a mailcap app.