Send To Browser – How to get it to work in Pandora Mail

In Eudora mail client, the precursor to Pandora Mail, there's a very easy way to open a message; in your Windows default web browser. You simply select Send to Browser from the message's preview pane, and the message then appears in the browser, like so:

Mail messages come from all sorts of senders, in all sorts of formats ranging from plain text to complex HTML, and they may not always render properly in your mail client. Viewing a complex message in your web browser will usually render such a message more faithfully.

Unfortunately this easy-to-use Send to Browser (STB) capability is not available in Pandora Mail, at least it isn't at the time of writing this post using the most recent Pandora version 4.1..9.1).

This matter has been discussed here in the Pandora Mail Forum, and on 30 April 2019 Brana Bujenovic provided a quite reasonable workaround by making use of manual filters,  as follows:

STEPS
1. Open Filters, create new filter with following specs:
Criteria: Any Header appears
Type: Manual
Action #1: Notify Application [Select your Internet browser].
Under parameters paste %MESSAGE_FILE_TEXT_HTML%. See Help/Filters for all available parameters.
Action #2: Skip Other Filters.

2. Save filters.
Once you set it up - it's a singular menu item, much like "Send to Browser", but you have a control over it, and you can set up few more (for different browsers, text editors and such).

To Use It
Select one or more messages from the mailbox window, or open some message:
Hit 'Message/Apply Filters' from the main menu and choose the above filter from the list.

I tried this, and my first mistake was to click the "New" button, which created the filter in the default location at the bottom of my filters list. For some users with only a few filters this would be no problem. However I had migrated all my filters across from Eudora and had nearly three thousand filters, which meant that to invoke the Send to Browser filter I had to scroll down and down and down tediously for several minutes before arriving at the desired filter.

So my fist lesson learned was to create all manual filters at the beginning of the filters list, as follows:

A second tip is to always alter each manual filter's description to something meaningful (such as the name of the browser).

Otherwise the manual STB filter names will display the sort of unfriendly technical gobbledygook shown just above in the bottom panel (highlighted in yellow). At the moment I have four such filters, and would not easily be able to tell them apart without giving all of them unique descriptions.

Let's now move on to how these STB filters work in practice. Sometimes I would invoke a filter and the message would indeed appear in the web browser, but in other cases nothing would happen. The operation of these manual filters seemed hit or miss.

For months I remained in a state of puzzlement -– not unusual for an octogenarian you will doubtlessly say! Then just over a week ago, out if the blue I had a moment of clarity and revelation.

I reasoned that it's the body of a message that you're mainly interest in when you wish to render a message in a web browser, so I altered each of my Send to Browser filters to have the Basic Criteria to be Body Appears (rather than Any Header appears):

This seems to have done the trick. After this change, messages whose body is made up of HTML now are rendered in the web browser. This is because (as recommended by Brana) the filters for their Notify Application section the parameter value:
%MESSAGE_FILE_TEXT_HTML%

But one issue still remains. Some messages have only plain text in their bodies, for example:

Here are the links to the latest version of our Super-Duper Joke Generator:
DOWNLOAD  …....  http://www.extrasuperduper.com/download
RELEASE NOTES …..  http://www.extrasuperduper.com/release-notes
BLOG:  …...  http://www.extrasuperduper.com/blog
USER FORUM:  …...  http://www.extrasuperduper.com/forum

For each browser, you have to create a second Send to Browser filter for messages having bodies that contain only plain text (no HTML to be rendered at all):

In this case, instead of

you must use  %MESSAGE_FILE_TEXT_PLAIN% 

ENHANCEMENT REQUEST:
The way that Send to Browser works in Eudora is straightforward and excellent, and I still would rank it as a high priority enhancement for Pandora Mail … Brana, please consider doing this, the sooner the better!

Well, that should do it. Please try out the above and send me your feedback.

But that's not quite all …

USABILITY TIP:
To finish off this post, here's a final tip. You add a toolbar button for each frequently used manual filter. The following screenshot shows my current toolbar layout, with a toolbar button being clicked to send a message from ALDI to my Waterfox browser:

These Send to Browser buttons are real time savers. A single button click eliminates the cumbersome three-step filter invocation process (shown just below) that otherwise must be followed each time:

The only issue with this approach – and it's a relatively minor issue -- is that all of these Send to Browser toolbar buttons display rather meaningless gobbledygook tooltip text:
"<<Body>>:appears => Notify Application + Skip Rest

(added 02 May 2020) The following animated GIF demonstrates this meaninglessness:

It would be a lot better if these tooltips displayed each filter's meaningful description (such as "Send to Waterfox"). You can get this by customizing the toolbar via the "Show Text" toggle button):

Because this expanded toolbar takes up far too much room at the top of the Pandora main window, and I would highly recommend to Brana to change this toggling to a button at the right-hand end of the toolbar, just like that in the top right corner of Windows File Manager for easily toggling the Ribbon, as follows:

Okay, that really is the lot. Some tips, and some enhancement requests. I ask for so much, don't I, but my only aim is to help make Pandora Mail even better than it is now.