mailcap-agent

mailcap-agent can be used to use local commands to view files from a remote host, e.g. when using ssh to read email. To use it, run

mailcap-server.py

on your local host, then add something like this to your ~/.ssh/config:

Host example.com
    RemoteForward /home/remoteuser/.mailcap.sock /home/localuser/.mailcap.sock

On the remote host, set up your ~/.mailcap, e.g. to open all images and PDFs using mailcap-agent, use the following example. The %t in these invocations is replaced with the type. It is optional, and the default is to run file(1) on the file and get the type from that.

image/*;mailcap-client.py %s %t
application/pdf;mailcap-client.py %s %t

Now try opening a file, either with some application that uses your mailcap file or directly:

mailcap-client.py some_image.jpg image/jpeg

or

mailcap-client.py invoice.pdf