#2131 accepted
Tuesday M-H

"Prefer Plain Text" heuristics

Reported by Tuesday M-H | October 8th, 2018 @ 09:26 PM

I get enough necessarily-formatted email that I have MmPreferPlainText disabled, but I also get a fair amount of unnecessarily-formatted email which would look nicer if shown in plain text.

It would be nice if the preference for default formatting option could have some kind of filter to determine, for a given message, which alternative should be displayed by default.

For example, almost all of the messages for which I would prefer HTML view are from newsletters and noreply addresses. For me, it would be ideal if those would be shown as HTML, and everything else would display as plain text.

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • benny

    benny November 21st, 2018 @ 10:24 AM

    • State changed from “new” to “accepted”

    Future changes to how mailbox related state is saved could possibly allow you to at least make this setting depend on the currently selected mailbox, for example, to only use it for mailing list mailboxes.

    But I think a solution similar to the Image Blocking setting (in the Security preferences pane) might make more sense. In any case, I'm open to providing some configurability.

  • Sandy

    Sandy October 10th, 2022 @ 08:45 AM

    • State changed from “accepted” to “new”

    I wonder if some regex-type filtering on messages would be possible?

    I receive many hand-written list emails that are either entirely plain text, or very lightly formatted, that insist on the text being in the html message part with a generic "You need an email client supporting text/html to view the content of this email." always in the plain text message part, or just ".". This means MailMate always shows me the plain text message part, since it is present and that is my preference, and I must then switch to HTML to read the actual message. Of course these are all from badly configured mailers, but given how consistent these non-contentful plain text parts are, it is probably easy to filter. Other ones I would probably set a regex filter for are ones that dump html source into the plain text part.

    Thanks.

  • benny

    benny October 10th, 2022 @ 05:56 PM

    • State changed from “new” to “accepted”

    @Sandy: I would be a bit worried about false positives on this regexp, but since the result would just be to show HTML for a message which did not really warrant it then it might be fine. The default would have to be to always show plain text. Many users enable it since they consider all HTML to be unsafe (and it would be easy to use this feature to trick MailMate to show arbitrary HTML).

  • Sandy

    Sandy October 12th, 2022 @ 07:52 AM

    @Benny: of course, good point. Thinking again, a per-mailbox setting would indeed work fine for the cases I described too – since I could set up my own smart mailbox with conditions for those types of messages I get, and then I would always know that selecting messages in that mailbox would render HTML.

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