Re: graphical mail reader for one-off use

[Thomas Dupond]

Le 2023-07-13 à 17:17, Ken Hornstein a écrit :
> > You can use $ open -a seamonkey `mhpath cur`
> >
> > It opens it as a text file. The .eml extension is required to show
> > text/thml. But with .eml extension you can just do
> >
> > $ open foo.eml
> >
> > and it will open in your default MUA. i.e. Apple Mail.  If you haven't
> > configured it, I don't know if it will work but it *should* work (not
> > that I have tested this).
>
> That's all good information; my only caveat is that I was under the
> impression that Paul is a Linux user based on the number of times he's
> asked how to get a working DB library development package, and "open"
> is a MacOS X thing (I see some Linux distros have a "open", but it seems
> to do something else).

On Linux, the equivalent command is "xdg-open".  On my computer running
Debian 5.10 with Gnome 3, if I understand correctly, the path to
determine which application should open which file is also determined on
the suffix when you use xdg-open.  I say this because each mime type is
defined in an XML file in /usr/share/mime.

So xdg-open looks up the file type (all file types are recorded in
/usr/share/mime/types) here for an email, it is message/rfc822.  It then
looks for a mimeapps.list file and when using Gnome, this file is
/usr/share/applications/gnome-mimeapps.list.

In this file you will find the line
message/rfc822=org.gnome.Evolution.desktop
So the Evolution program is launched (with the launch options specified 
in /usr/share/applications/org.gnome.Evolution.desktop)

If you want to change the default program, you should write your own
mimeapps.list and put it at ~/.config/mimeapps.list.

Maybe I go in too much detail but I had a hard time wrapping my head
around this in the past so maybe I'm not alone :)

Regards,
Thomas