HTML messages SOMETIMES are presented in Firefox

[Goran Uddeborg]

I'm using VM 8.2.0b, and recently switched from Emacs 21.4 on RHEL5 to
Emacs 23.1 on RHEL6.

I'm used to having HTML shown inline using the default mechanism using
w3 or whatever it is called. And that still works SOME OF THE TIME.
But occasionally, when I move to an HTML mail, instead Firefox is
started showing my mail.

I get error messages in *Messages* which I believe, without knowing
for sure, to be related:

Inlining text/html by emacs-w3m...
Decoding quoted-printable... done
Inline text/html by emacs-w3m display failed: Args out of range: 1, 1
Decoding quoted-printable... done
Wrote /tmp/vm24421537327.html
Decoding MIME message... done

That "args out of range" looks suspicious, but I'm not sure what to
make out of it.

This is not specific to particular messages. The very same message
can be shown correctly one time, and the next time I move to it, it
triggers Firefox.

I might have done something wrong in my configurations, but I don't
know what it might be. I have not been able to reproduce it with
emtpy configurations, but since it only happens occasionally, I'm not
sure if that means anything.

Any ideas on how I might debug this?

[Uday Reddy]

I haven't been monitoring the gnu.emacs.vm.bug newsgroup because it is
essentially defunct. Please use gnu.emacs.vm.info (or, preferably, the
viewmail-info mailing list).

The behaviour you are finding is normal for VM. If it can't display the
content using the internal viewer for whatever reason, it tries the
external viewer. If you do not want the external viewer to be fired,
then you have to remove that setting from your .vm file.

The error is most likely happening inside emacs-w3m. It is probably to
do with displaying images, as this bug report indicates:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/vm/+bug/595091

It is not a problem that VM can do anything about.

Cheers,
Uday

[Göran Uddeborg]

Uday Reddy:

> The error is most likely happening inside emacs-w3m. It is probably to
> do with displaying images, as this bug report indicates:
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/vm/+bug/595091

It does not seem to be exactly the same problem. I have got this on
occasions when I've been away from the computer for hours, and look at
a new mail when I get back. So I'm pretty sure there wasn't any
previous w3m involved. I also don't hear any beep.

I'll see if I can do something some more investigations to figure out
what is going on.

[Uday Reddy]

Goran Uddeborg writes:

> This is not specific to particular messages. The very same message
> can be shown correctly one time, and the next time I move to it, it
> triggers Firefox.

I didn't notice this bit earlier.

If it doesn't happen all the time, then the problem is likely to be that the
`w3m' program is misbehaving and emacs-w3m is not detecting the problem.
You can try reporting it on the emacs-w3m mailing list.

Cheers,
Uday