HACKER Q&A
📣 TekMol

How to View the HTML Part of an Email?


I use Thunderbird. I have configured it so that it shows me the text part of the emails I get.

Unfortunately, every now and then the text part is so broken that I would like to render the HTML part.

But it seems like Thunderbird does not offer a way to do this for a single email.

Looking at the source code of such an email, there is no plain HTML but some gibberish with "Content-Type: multipart/alternative;" or "Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable".

Any ideas how to go about this?

  👤 petercooper Accepted Answer ✓
I actually did a video about this very topic a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM_EqpSuodY .. but basically you can find an online converter for quoted-printable. I'm not sure how useful this is for repeated use, I was doing it for debugging purposes.
👤 LinuxBender
The method I prefer is to put the email in a text file and read it with parsemime.pl [1] There is probably a way to call this directly from Thunderbird but I do it so rarely I just haven't bothered to look into it.

[1] - https://www.gnu.org/software/gnats/mimedecode.html

👤 TekMol
PS: Now I noticed there is "View > Message Body As > Original HTML"

That applies to all messages. But it is quick enough to switch it back. So I will use that.