it sometimes funny, i'm working with mutt since about 10years, (the 5years before i was using elm) and just found out how i can view pure text/html-Mails without fiddeling with piping and things.

set implicit_autoview

in .muttrc does the trick.

but now mutt also prefers the text/html-part of multipart/alternative-mails, this is going to far for me. i want the text/plain-part if available. mutt has also a solution here:

alternative_order text/plain text/html

and done. no more piping to html2text. One day i'll read through the whole manual again...