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MailMate renders HTML mails as HTML

#50

MailMate renders HTML mails as HTML, but there does not appear to be a preference for rendering the plain text part by default. (Selecting View > Next Alternative each time is not an acceptable way of handling this, especially since particularly ugly HTML will still have been displayed first).

Ideally, there should be three options:

  • Display HTML if available, otherwise plain text
  • Display plain text if available, otherwise HTML
  • Always display plain text - if only a text/html part is available, convert to plain text

In an app which actually acknowledges and supports bottom-posting, and doesn't even compose in HTML, it's kind of surprising to find this missing :)

Reported by John Y · February 18th, 2011 @ 10:26 AM

State: accepted
Milestone: none
Assigned to: benny benny

Activity

  1. benny
    benny
    • State changed from new to accepted

    I agree with the feature description.

    Option 2 and 3 probably needs a heuristic to determine when a plain text
    section essentially only contains a comment about no text part being
    available (typically with a link to a webpage).

    Option 3 is also the tricky one and will require some work, but I guess
    option 2 would handle most cases.

    There is an experimental mode. I don't think that it always works as
    expected when body parts are organized in certain ways, but you can try
    it if you like. Quit MailMate, go to Terminal and paste:

    defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmPreferPlainText -bool YES

    To disable it again:

    defaults remove com.freron.MailMate MmPreferPlainText

    You are welcome to add comments to this thread on the behavior of the
    above. Then it can be improved to become a GUI-worthy option.

    [state:accepted]

    February 18th, 2011 @ 04:02 PM

  2. Erik M-H
    Erik M-H

    Benny, thanks for this workaround. I'm trying out MailMate and so far my only real complaint has been that it didn't prefer plain text.

    Spot-checking a half-dozen messages shows the hidden preference seems to work exactly as expected and hoped.

    Thanks to John for the pointer to View > Next Alternative, which now lets me view HTML-formatted messages in those occasional situations where it makes more sense.

    MailMate looks great, Benny -- I'm very impressed so far.

    March 29th, 2011 @ 05:06 PM

  3. benny
    benny

    Thanks. I'm glad you like it.

    It is a hidden preference because it can fail to show the correct body
    part. I think an example is an email constructed as follows:

    multipart/related
    multipart/alternative
        text/plain
        text/html
    image/png
    image/png

    March 29th, 2011 @ 07:00 PM

  4. benny
    benny
    • State changed from accepted to fixreleased

    This has been an option in the Viewer preferences pane for some time now.

    (Option 3 in the original request is not supported.)

    May 25th, 2012 @ 02:14 PM

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