launching firefox with text/html entry in mutt 1.5,21

I recently decided that I might want to see some html mails in a real browser instead of a w3m dump. For example when I need to click on the stupid reset password link, which is sent in the html only mail from easyjet.

Figured it would be the easiest thing in the world to do, just change the mailcap entry for text/html and you’re set. But instead I get this:

mailcap entry for type text/html not found

The bad part: It obviously doesn’t work that way. Turns out certain changes in the auto_view behaviour of mutt 1.5.21 cause this. There’s even a bugreport on the matter

The good part: You can now have 2 mailcap entries for text/html. One will be used to display the message inside of mutt. The other will run firefox by pressing m (view-mailcap) in the file list.

My mailcap thus starts as follows:

text/html; firefox %s ;
text/html; w3m -T text/html -dump %s; copiousoutput

Note that the order of the entries is important. Should you switch it both m and the pager will only show the dump.