Path: ...!weretis.net!feeder8.news.weretis.net!news.mixmin.net!aioe.org!cElpSTrKgFRCsybgLlGHqA.user.46.165.242.91.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Dirk Fieldhouse Newsgroups: alt.comp.software.seamonkey Subject: Reading email as plain text Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2021 16:20:54 +0000 Organization: Speaking personally Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Info: gioia.aioe.org; logging-data="6591"; posting-host="cElpSTrKgFRCsybgLlGHqA.user.gioia.aioe.org"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@aioe.org"; User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0 SeaMonkey/2.53.10 X-Mozilla-News-Host: news://freenews.netfront.net X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.9.2 Bytes: 4330 Lines: 75 For those who like to read email in plain text, with actual link URLs exposed, etc, SM (and TB, though maybe not in the GUI of recent versions - I haven't checked) offer more facilities than you might think. From the SM GUI (View>Message Body As...) you can choose to view messages as Plaintext, Simple HTML, or Original HTML. This is a global setting; sadly, changing it in separate message window persists across the whole application. One might wonder what "Simple HTML" is. The details are explained by the developer (expired cert): In the table below, "html_as" specified the transformation applied to the HTML part, and "disallow_mime_handlers" specifies the stringency of stripping potentially nasty content from the HTML, unless overridden by a higher global setting. > UI option pref values (mailnews.display.*) > prefer_plaintext html_as disallow_mime_handlers > Original HTML false 0 0 (no HTML) > Simple HTML false 3 1 (strip using built-in list) > Plaintext true 1 1 Ben explains that "Simple HTML" is generated by converting the "Original HTML" to plain text with a sort of Markdown-like formatting and then converting it back to HTML. The aim is to strip out potentially dangerous links. The conversion process is described here . This is great, but there's one issue. A lot of corporate email comes with a deliberately useless plaintext alternative part that says something like "To show this message as we want, open this link in your browser". In such a case one would like to force the display of the HTML part as converted to plaintext, but (apart from manually deleting the plaintext part using an add-on like "Header Tools Lite") the only option in the GUI is to switch to Simple HTML to read the email, and then back again. The add-on "Allow HTML Temp" used to enable a one-time switch but no longer works in 2.53.10+. Ben explains that there is a config option combination to help: mailnews.display. prefer_plaintext false html_as 1 With these settings an HTML alternative part, if present, should be shown after converting to formatted plain text; otherwise the plaintext part should be shown. This works just as if the plaintext alternative to an HTML part was deleted. Now the problem is that the GUI doesn't recognise this combination of settings, which gets nuked if one of the "View>Message Body As" options is selected. Finally, going back to : > Attachments in emails with certain structures or encodings may not be shown in the attachment pane. Set the mailnews.display.show_all_body_parts_menu pref to true in about:config, then select View/Message Body As/All Body Parts to make such attachments available (BZ 677905). But unfortunately "All Body Parts" corresponds to "html_as" = 4, so enabling and using this item also nukes the "prefer_plaintext=false, html_as=1" combination. If an add-on (or a patch to the source) were to enable that combination in the "View>Message Body As" menu, what should it called? "Textified HTML"? "HTML As Plaintext"? "Elucidated HTML" (made plain!)? /df -- London UK