HTML-stripping mail reader?

Anyone know of a mail client that can strip html tags from a message and just keep the content? Automagicly? (In effect converting html mails to regular text)

Or possibly one with some kind of scripting support with regexps or something.

Eric DeBois
Monday, December 15, 2003

The Bat ( http://www.ritlabs.com/the_bat/ ) has an option to display any message as text only.

uncronopio
Monday, December 15, 2003

--> In Apple Mail there is an option to "display only the text portion of an HTML message" (under Viewing Preferences). But I suspect you're using Windows, you didn't say?

--> Thunderbird has an option "When displaying HTML messages marked as junk, sanitize the HTML", but this would only handle messages which T'Bird believed to be spam.

Do you want to prevent spammers from tracking you with "web bugs"? Or are you just annoyed by HTML and want to text-ify it?

Nate Silva
Monday, December 15, 2003

Thanks guys..

I just hate html mail, spam or not. Im doing stuff for a company right now where everyone seems to think a mail should look like a web page.
They have pics in their sigs!

Eric DeBois
Monday, December 15, 2003

and btw: Im running all three major platforms, but I read my mail on the win box.
I never used the mail client on my power book so thanks for the tip. Im goning to give that a try.

Eric DeBois
Monday, December 15, 2003

Outlook(not sure what version will have it since I have 2003): Options->E-mail options -> Read all standard mail in plain text

WildTiger
Monday, December 15, 2003

Mozilla has "View|Message Body As" with options "original HTML", simplified HTML and plaintext.

Ori Berger
Monday, December 15, 2003

Thunderbird has the same options as Mozilla.

Eric Moore
Tuesday, December 16, 2003

In Outlook Express (I think it's only in the latest version) you can go to Tools -> Options -> Read, and there is a setting "Read all messages in plaing text". Works great!

In Outlook, you can download an add-on that replaces the preview panel and displays only text. It's called "Chilton Preview", and it can be downloaded from here: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Peaks/8392/ . Works great, too!

Antti Kurenniemi
Tuesday, December 16, 2003

Both outlook and Outlook express offer this in the preview pane.
I haven't read anything but plain text for months. The ONLY problem with this is when you reply to html messages and would like to use > style quoting its all a bit of pain.
For Outlook XP (and I think 2000) it's a registry hack, Outlook 2003 I think has a switch (and probably gets the quoting right, reminder to self to investigate for home)
Outlook express (Versions after XP SP1 ) have it under tools/options/read/ read all messages in plain text.

Warning! the text stripping isn't perfect, some unkind folks stashed some malformed HTML into newsgroup messages which caused OE (and therefore I assume since Outlook uses the same newsreader code) to crash. Took me a while to spot, once I'd found out what was wrong I plonked the sender and bugged it with MS.

Peter Ibbotson
Tuesday, December 16, 2003

I work with email lots. Once I was manually unsubbing someone from a list, the unsub request came from a governmental department and cc'ed was the original out-going email. The original outgoing email was in html, and somehow a filter at their end rendered it into text only and textual page with all the tables reserved. Very impressive. My old college friend Pat (http://www.csh.rit.edu/~pat/, email him for the library) had a library that will take text and spew+autowrap them into user-specified ascii blocks in a X by Y character-based canvas, with a library like that you could build the right kind of html-aware preview pane we all wish was added to Outlook.

Li-fan Chen
Tuesday, December 16, 2003

Sylpheed.

For Linux/Unix only as far as I know.

Matthew Hannigan
Wednesday, December 17, 2003

  Recent Topics

  Fog Creek Home