Relevant MINE headers were as follows:
Content-Type: text/html; charset="ansi_x3.4-1968"
THAT character set is intersting.
It's not just that HTML is largely pointless and unnecessarily wasteful
of bandwidth. It's that morons working in the bowels of corporations
all over this planet clearly have no idea how to properly craft even
HTMLized email messages in such a way that they will render properrly
for those of us who use plain text email clients like nmh.
Weeeelll ... it's not that I disagree with you, exactly. But I think
you're just screaming into the void at this point.
First, sending someone a link that they have to cut & paste (as opposed
to just being able to click on it) is pretty user-unfriendly. Secondly,
the number of people who use a plain text email client is MINISCULE
compared to the entire universe of email users. That battle has been
lost a long time ago. I know some people are still fighting it, but
I think the rest of the world doesn't even have the the perception
that email is "plain text", so they don't even recognize that there is
something people would fight about. These are just the facts as I see
them, no matter how much you or I would prefer otherwise. Complaining
that the Internet doesn't work with nmh is the wrong way around; it's
nmh that has to do better.
So as a first step I would suggest you disabuse yourself of the notion
the email is "plain text"; that hasn't been true for a long time. Once
you accept that, you'll realize it shouldn't matter what the format of
the message is, or what the encoding is.
If this ever comes up again, what is the Right Answer? Given a single
part email message with the MIME headers I've described above, what is
the simplest way for a person, such as myself, to be able to view the
raw HTML (but decoded out of base64, of course)?
mhstore will happily extract out the parts from email and perform the
proper decoding, like Howard Bampton suggested.
When faced with similar emails on my system, the out-of-the-box setup
automatically runs HTML emails through w3m, and I have w3m configured so
that it assigns every hyperlink a number and there are a list of all of
the link locations at the bottom of the message text. So I know that if
I need to click on link [3], I can just look for [3] at the bottom and
do the appropriate cut & paste. I believe that a stock setup on FreeBSD
using the latest port should do that (except for the w3m part regarding
the hyperlink summary), but it sounds like you have configured things to
undo all of our hard work on that front, or maybe there's a problem with
the package you are using.
And yes, 'll be back again to get some final help with unsnarling my
substantially mucked up personal nmh configuration when, if ever, I
can just get my head above the water line. (Not this week, that's for
sure.)
I will note that if you used all of the time you spent dealing with these
HTML emails and instead dealt with your nmh configuration so it was
all handled natively, you'd probably be ahead of the game time-wise :-/
--Ken
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