Live data from Hacker News

Switching to the Mutt Email Client

nullprogram.com

1–10 of 246 posts

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#2
Console based mail-clients are very powerful and fast to use. I was a long-time mutt user before I started writing my own mail client, with complete scripting provided by Lua.

Having a real scripting language allows a lot of useful features, at times using mutt felt a little bit too constrained, although it has a lot of features and is very very flexible in its own right:

https://github.com/lumail/lumail

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#3

Console based mail-clients are very powerful and fast to use. I was a long-time mutt user before I started writing my own mail client, with complete scripting provided by Lua. Having a real scripting language allows a lot of useful features, at times using mutt felt a little bit too constrained, although it has a lot of features and is very very flexible in its own right: https://github.com/lumail/lumail

Then you should try looking at NeoMutt (www.neomutt.org). It's a pseudo fork of Mutt that has added a lot of new features.

Recently it landed full Lua scripting support as well. Guess you're not the only one that was looking for more powerful configuration within mutt.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#4

Console based mail-clients are very powerful and fast to use. I was a long-time mutt user before I started writing my own mail client, with complete scripting provided by Lua. Having a real scripting language allows a lot of useful features, at times using mutt felt a little bit too constrained, although it has a lot of features and is very very flexible in its own right: https://github.com/lumail/lumail

The article seems to think that everyone should switch away from HTML. But how well does console clients deal with HTML emails. It's not like you can tell everyone to stop sending you HTML.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#5
Interestingly, I went the other way. I used to have mutt for years, then went through a dark phase (macOS Mail.app, Evernote and Things) and finally concluded to Emacs with mu4e.

Integrating mail with Emacs was the best idea ever, because Emails include either todos or serve as reference in projects. Creating todos from Mails as well as linking to them from org-mode is only a shortcut away.

I have never had a more easy to manage and productive todo management system - and it's all text, so there will never be breaking changes or paid upgrades or incompatibilities between tools that I cannot fix.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#6

Console based mail-clients are very powerful and fast to use. I was a long-time mutt user before I started writing my own mail client, with complete scripting provided by Lua. Having a real scripting language allows a lot of useful features, at times using mutt felt a little bit too constrained, although it has a lot of features and is very very flexible in its own right: https://github.com/lumail/lumail

The article seems to think that everyone should switch away from HTML. But how well does console clients deal with HTML emails. It's not like you can tell everyone to stop sending you HTML.

Mutt deals surprisingly well with HTML emails. Most newsletters and other HTML mails usually come with a plain text version as well which Mutt will preferably display. Apart from that, you can make mutt pipe the HTML Email to a console browser for rendering. It works transparently. I've been doing this for a while now

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#7

Console based mail-clients are very powerful and fast to use. I was a long-time mutt user before I started writing my own mail client, with complete scripting provided by Lua. Having a real scripting language allows a lot of useful features, at times using mutt felt a little bit too constrained, although it has a lot of features and is very very flexible in its own right: https://github.com/lumail/lumail

The article seems to think that everyone should switch away from HTML. But how well does console clients deal with HTML emails. It's not like you can tell everyone to stop sending you HTML.

I suppose that mutt could be configured to either display the plain text MIME part of such an email, or pipe the HTML through something like links -dump.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#8

Console based mail-clients are very powerful and fast to use. I was a long-time mutt user before I started writing my own mail client, with complete scripting provided by Lua. Having a real scripting language allows a lot of useful features, at times using mutt felt a little bit too constrained, although it has a lot of features and is very very flexible in its own right: https://github.com/lumail/lumail

The article seems to think that everyone should switch away from HTML. But how well does console clients deal with HTML emails. It's not like you can tell everyone to stop sending you HTML.

What made me switched back to Mutt was the ability to call subapplications to show you emails. As I always have a browser running, I can tell mutt to show it in firefox, which allows me to watch the HTML mail in all of it's glory (instead of a lynx like dump in the console which I do not like).

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#9
I used some good emacs mail client up to 1995, then the need to read Office attachments made me switch to some Windows client. HTML messages were not a thing yet. The switch was a regression in functionality for at least ten years, up to outbound filters in Thunderbird.

Edit: third question, how do you read mail on your phone? A couple of questions for the author. How do you handle attachments and do you download mail over POP3/IMAP or do you have your own server (hence SpamAssassin) ?

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#10

Console based mail-clients are very powerful and fast to use. I was a long-time mutt user before I started writing my own mail client, with complete scripting provided by Lua. Having a real scripting language allows a lot of useful features, at times using mutt felt a little bit too constrained, although it has a lot of features and is very very flexible in its own right: https://github.com/lumail/lumail

I found neomutt and find it to be nice. One thing that's been annoying me in mutt is that there is no unified inbox. Neomutt integrates notmuch as a first class citizen along with some other niceties(amongst others basic lua scripting).

https://www.neomutt.org/changes/user

https://www.neomutt.org/2017/04/29/lua

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14567303

Post reply on HN