[Discuss] Converting "rich" (MIME) email to plain text

[smallm at sdf.org (Mike Small)]

Michael Tiernan <michael.tiernan at gmail.com> writes:

> I'm sure that I'm not the first who tried to find an easy way to filter 
> a piece of email so that only the plain text comes out.
>
> I can find lots of things about going plain to HTML but I've not seen 
> anything that allows you to just extract the "Content-Type: text/plain" 
> section of an email.
>
> Any pointers available? I don't want to try and reinvent the reinvented 
> wheel.

Are you willing to use a different agent than Thunderbird? I recall Gnus
having settings you could use to prioritize which alternative should be
displayed. There were even hooks I was able to use to have different
preferences in response to header patterns. mutt has a setting called
alternative_order for this. I've just started using RMAIL (in emacs) and
it seems to get it right without customization, favouring text/plain
over text/html. Now I just need to teach it to automatically delete
the emails that lack text/plain.

Maybe Thunderbird has something like this, perhaps via a plugin, but my
(limited) Thunderbird experience has been uninspiring.