Here’s a neat trick for rich text (HTML) e-mail preview in the mu4e MUA.

Instead of default HTML preview, I use the Fedora sandbox like this:

(setq mu4e-html2text-command "/usr/bin/sandbox w3m -dump -T text/html")

I have the above line in my .emacs, and in effect it just filters all HTML e-mails with w3m run inside the sandbox when I want to read the e-mail.

By default, the sandbox provides standard input and output to the application, and not much anything else. That’s perfectly enough for w3m in -dump -mode.

Oh and why I do this? In my use the elisp HTML-parser is tad too slow, so I wanted to use faster parser. w3m is a C-program interfacing arbitrary HTML-content from the interwebs and I wanted to make sure it behaves.