How to select a URL from an email in mutt and open it in a web browser?

Question

When I read mails I sometimes would like to select one of the links in the mail's text to open it in a web browser.

Before you answer, I know there is urlview, but there are also BASE64-encoded (or other transfer encodings) mails from which urlview does not find any URLs. Then there are also HTML-only mails that can also be encoded with transfer encodings.

I wonder if there is a trivial and/or nice solution that I couldn't find. I cannot be the only one with this problem. It does not need to be based on urlview, of course.

Answer 1

urlview will work if you employ the "pipe_decode" setting. Example use in a macro, binding to "\u":

macro index,pager \\u "<enter-command>set pipe_decode = yes<enter><pipe-message>urlview<enter><enter-command>set pipe_decode = no<enter>" "view URLs"

Answer 2

with urlscan there exists a worthy successor to urlview.

Support for emails in quoted-printable and base64 encodings. [..] For HTML mails, a crude parser is used to render the HTML into text.