So, in my time with mutt, I have grown to have a disdain for people that send HTML only email. And surprisingly, this happens alot! So, instead of trying to change the world, I’ve decided to just use mutt and lynx to my advantage and call it a day. Thanks to one of my co-workers for showing me how to do this.

At the end of your ~/.mailcap file, add the following

text/html; lynx -dump -width=78 -nolist %s | sed ‘s/^   //’; copiousoutput; needsterminal; nametemplate=%s.html

Then, in the ~/.muttrc add

auto_view text/x-vcard text/html text/enriched

And restart mutt. This will use lynx to render the email. You can substitute lynx for any text-based html browser you’d like.

A need has arisen here recently for me to need to “change” the headers on an email, so I can tell two people at work apart. Both have their name in the email header the same. Let’s call them “John Doe.” So in order to tell them apart, I’ve added a reverse alias rule to mutt to handle this. First enable the use of them by using

set reverse_alias

Then set up the alias. This can be added to your alias file, or straight into your .muttrc

alias fake_john john_doe2@example.com (Fake John Doe)

Now all mail that comes in from john_doe2@example.com will show up as from “Fake John Doe” but the headers will remain the same, and no one is the wiser.