Yesterday, in my post about sending HTML emails with mu4e, I noted that being able to send HTML emails is only half the problem; probably the easiest half. The hard part is being able to read a properly rendered email form within mu4e. Eww sometimes works—sort of—but some emails (Amazon is a notable guilty party here) are simply unreadable without a trip to the browser. It’s not that hard to pop up a browser tab and then delete it when you’re done but that’s extra work and violates the stay-in-Emacs rule that many of us try to live by.
If you’re an X user, RichieHHam has a possible answer for you. He has a reddit post that describes how to use XWidgets to read emails from within Emacs. Sadly, if you’re a Mac user like me, this solution is not available to you—at least not easily.
Being a Mac user also means I can’t try this out so I have no idea how well it works. If you’re a Linux user and try it out, leave a comment to let other Irreal readers running Linux know.
Afterword
After I wrote this, I nosed around the Internet a bit and discovered that there are some XWidget solutions for macOS but I have no idea if they would work with RichieHHam’s HTML email setup. Really, the best solution is for Emacs to accurately render HTML natively but that’s not trivial.