As part of the cron.weekly newsletter , I want to test the plain-text version of the mail as much as possible.
This has actually become surprisingly hard. Gmail no longer has the option to show the plain-text version of an email (just the raw source, in which the plain-text version is embedded). Apple’s Mail lost the ability as well.
So I’ll fall back to trusty Mutt as the e-mail client.
Install mutt via homebrew#
The installation is easy enough with Homebrew .
$ brew install mutt
Now you have the mutt binary available.
Converting the .EML to MBOX format#
Mutt doesn’t directly read .EML files, the format you’d get when you download an email from Gmail or export it from Outlook or Apple Mail.
$ mutt -f mail.eml
mail.eml is not a mailbox.
So first, we’ll convert this to the MBOX format. For this, we need formail, part of the procmail package.
$ brew install procmail
$ formail -b < mail.eml > mail.mbox
Now we have a valid mail.mbox file, which we can read.
$ mutt -f mail.mbox
Evaluating the layout#
Looks good enough to me!
Spot any improvements to the text-version I should make?