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Mutt 1.6

mutt.org

31–40 of 191 posts

Re: Mutt 1.6

#31
post #9
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing to envy from Gmail. I switched because of search, which is amazing in gmail and hard in mutt (for me). What do you do?

> search amazing in gmail. really? until a few months ago, you couldn't find anything besides whole words with textual search on gmail. why do people have it's search at such high standards? how bad was the alternative you had?

What are you talking about? What have you've been missing?

Senders name or email? That has always been an option. Has attachments? Been an option since forever. tags? Since forever. date? Available since forever.

Re: Mutt 1.6

#33
post #3

I use it daily. It's a lovely email client. Close to the Unix ideal of doing one thing, and doing it well. Integration with other utilities (notmuch, isync) for indexing and sync'ing is very easy, thanks to close adherence to Unix principles, and gets you a very neat setup. Nothing to envy from Gmail.

I personally always felt that "full applications" were disconnected from the Unix philosophy. By definition, such an application does many things: fetch things from the network, display them, sort them, ... it talks many protocols, concerns itself with many I/O systems.

I'm certainly not saying that it is the way to go, but a real Unix philosophy way of dealing with email would be to use a command to pull mails from a mail server as text files (heck, as a text stream!), then other commands to display them, sort them, ...

Re: Mutt 1.6

#35
post #6

It's been many years since I've used mutt, but I'm considering going back to it. For a while, HTML email had become so common that it was uncomfortable to use a text email client, but that trend seems to have reversed...most of my business communication is plain text (maybe a shift in the people I interact with for business). The speed of mutt is damned near impossible to beat, and the bandwidth usage is so tiny (I c…

Where do you live / travel where you are spending $300 a month on Internet? I live in Australia (not the cheapest place) and spend $50 AUD a month for 12G of data and free international calls to 10 countries.

Re: Mutt 1.6

#36
post #26
post #3

I use it daily. It's a lovely email client. Close to the Unix ideal of doing one thing, and doing it well. Integration with other utilities (notmuch, isync) for indexing and sync'ing is very easy, thanks to close adherence to Unix principles, and gets you a very neat setup. Nothing to envy from Gmail.

the UNIX philosophy died with the advent of the web imo. The emacs editor/Mozilla suite (SeaMonkey) mentality of doing most things and doing them relatively well is the reality we have inherited.

Not the case in my reality.

Emacs has always been That Way. And then CERN/Mosaic happened, and browsers (being all-singing, all-dancing environments that do everything from page layout to hosting interpreters and databases, are also big apps) came along.

This has not lead to awk becoming an MUA, or tmux adding a flight simulator, or tee offering to store things as PDFs. Nor has it stopped the development of building-block tools - I still see more nifty new things built with more or less the same assumptions than I can play with.

The only thing I can think of is that you're referring to GUI apps, at least mostly on Linux. GUIs (or more specifically, what Alan Cooper termed 'sovereign applications', but they are mostly GUIs) are typically subject to Zawinski's Law in ways that command line tools are not. Heck, Mutt is somewhat subject to it, itself, for that reason.

Re: Mutt 1.6

#38
post #28
post #14

most desktop clients (mutt included) almost died when everyone moved to gmail and such. imap/pop access was too expensive (when compared to having a so-so UI for free) or not available. now that gmail and yahoomail give imap for free, they will surely comeback. see N1 for example.

Pretty sure gmail supported POP from day one, and it has supported IMAP since 2007 [1]. The problem is that gmail's mail organizational system is sort of incompatible with POP/IMAP and completely incompatible with a number of clients. That started to change around 2010 when gmail had been so popular for so long that the standards and clients started to accomodate gmail's way of doing things. Desktop MUAs won't sudden…

I think the main thing is that people see no difference between gmail and other web messaging (eg Facebook) anymore. It's a text box on a website.

Re: Mutt 1.6

#39
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> search amazing in gmail. really? until a few months ago, you couldn't find anything besides whole words with textual search on gmail. why do people have it's search at such high standards? how bad was the alternative you had?

What are you talking about? What have you've been missing? Senders name or email? That has always been an option. Has attachments? Been an option since forever. tags? Since forever. date? Available since forever.

Regexp.

Re: Mutt 1.6

#40
post #33
post #3

I use it daily. It's a lovely email client. Close to the Unix ideal of doing one thing, and doing it well. Integration with other utilities (notmuch, isync) for indexing and sync'ing is very easy, thanks to close adherence to Unix principles, and gets you a very neat setup. Nothing to envy from Gmail.

I personally always felt that "full applications" were disconnected from the Unix philosophy. By definition, such an application does many things: fetch things from the network, display them, sort them, ... it talks many protocols, concerns itself with many I/O systems. I'm certainly not saying that it is the way to go, but a real Unix philosophy way of dealing with email would be to use a command to pull mails from…

I think a lot of Mutt users do what you are describing.

I use mbsync to synchronize my mail over IMAP with my remote mailserver. I use mu to index it for search. I use msmtp to send mail. And I use mutt to read and write mail.

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