HTML emails and recommended solution?

[Jonas Steverud <tvrud@bredband.net>]

The plague of HTML in emails doesn't seems to vanish, hardly
surprising to anyone, and so far I've had

(setq mm-discouraged-alternatives (remove "text/html" mm-discouraged-alternatives))

(add-to-list 'mm-inline-media-tests '("text/html" nil (lambda (h) nil)))
(add-to-list 'mm-discouraged-alternatives "text/html")
(add-to-list 'mm-discouraged-alternatives "text/richtext")
(add-to-list 'mm-discouraged-alternatives "text/enriched")
(setq mm-automatic-display (remove "text/html" mm-automatic-display)
      mm-automatic-display (remove "text/richtext" mm-automatic-display)
      mm-automatic-display (remove "text/enriched" mm-automatic-display))

To reduce the damages, but I've decided that I maybe should try to see
if some new approach has come up since I added those lines (which was
quite some years ago).

So, my question now is how you would recommend me to handle HTML
emails?

In 99.9999% of the cases, the HTML is just there for no other reason
then the programmer and the user are morons and it doesn't add
anything to the message. I.e. it could be stripped on sight.

I have W3 installed and I can find it acceptable to have it render the
emails.

I would like to see the text portion if it is available, otherwise it
should be sent to W3 for rendering automatically.

What I'm afraid of is that the email contains ads that W3 then have to
download (i.e. images) and in spams this is a common approach to
validate working addresses. If it is spam I don't want W3 to do
anything and in case of ads in ordinary emails (usually Yahoogroups or
emails sent form MSN et al) I don't want W3 to download anything
either since I don't want to see the ads.

Any takes on how Gnus and W3 should be configured to handle this?

GNU Emacs 21.3.1 (powerpc-apple-darwin, X toolkit)
No Gnus v0.1

-- 
(        http://hem.bredband.net/steverud/        !     Wei Wu Wei     )
(        Meaning of U2 Lyrics, Roleplaying        !  To Do Without Do  )