Yes, that’s right, I’m still in the dark ages and do not yet use Gmail for my email. Even though it has IMAP and everything. I still use Mutt.
I almost always use Mutt locally, using offlineimap to sync IMAP folders to local maildirs. This means I don’t usually have the problem of being unable to view non-text attachments. However, for the next little while I’ll be using Mutt on a remote connection.
Don Marti has one solution to this, which assumes that you are accessing the server with Mutt on it via SSH (probably true) and are easily able to create a tunnel to your local machine, which is trivial if you are using a commandline ssh client, but while you can do it with PuTTY I figured it was just annoying enough that I might not bother. (And I doubt you can do it at all with those web-based SSH clients.)
My alternative assumes instead that you have a webserver on the remote machine that has mutt on it. It then just copies the attachment to a web-accessible directory, and tells you the URL where you’ll be able to find the attachment. It’s thus a very trivial script (and I doubt very much it’s the only one out there), but perhaps using mine might save you fifteen minutes over coming up with your own, so here it is:
copy-to-dir.sh (in a bzr git repo)
Sample output is along these lines when you try to view an attachment in Mutt:
View attachment SOMEPDF.pdf at http://example.com/~user/SOMEPDF.pdf Press any key to continue, and delete viewable attachment
In order to use it, you need to:
- copy the script to the remote machine where you use mutt;
- make it executable;
- edit it to set the OUTPUTDIR and VIEWINGDIR variables to something that works for your setup;
- set up a custom mailcap file much like the one Don Marti gives, that is, put something like this in your ~/.mutt-mailcap:
text/*; PATH-TO-SCRIPT/copy-to-dir.sh %s application/*; PATH-TO-SCRIPT/copy-to-dir.sh %s image/*; PATH-TO-SCRIPT/copy-to-dir.sh %s audio/*; PATH-TO-SCRIPT/copy-to-dir.sh %s
- set mailcap_path = ~/.mutt-mailcap in your ~/.muttrc file.
Something like this probably could work for Pine and other text-based email clients used remotely too, but I’m not sure howi because I don’t use them. And if someone wants to document this in a way that assumes less pre-existing knowledge, go ahead.
Also, making your attachments web-accessible means that they are, well, web-accessible. I’ve set up a HTTP Auth-protected directory using https for this, you should think about your own setup too.
Viewing attachments when using mutt remotely by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.