I use Mutt as my primary mail reader and have my mailcap configured to use a text-mode browser to deal with HTML mails. For images and other binary attachments, I copy them into a directory that’s accessible over the web so I can view/download them that way. This (mostly) works.

My biggest annoyance is that I subscribe to a number of different Mailchimp-powered mailing lists (voluntary groups, NGOs, music promoters, etc.) and I regularly receive emails where the subject line doesn’t match the body of the email as displayed by Mutt. The reason is that I receive a multi-part message with both plain text and HTML attachments. However, only the HTML part contains the relevant text; the plain text part is a copy of a previous email (in some cases a year old).

I’m guessing there’s something in the Mailchimp UI that makes it easier for organisations to load a previous email and use that as a template to send the next message – except that they don’t seem to notice that they also need to update the plain-text part. If they’re only going to edit the HTML part, it’d be better for subscribers like me if they didn’t send any plain text version.

I’ve emailed the senders to let them know about this issue. One environmental NGO replied to say they’d check the plain text version next time while neither music promoter replied at all.