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Switching to the Mutt Email Client

nullprogram.com

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Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#71

Post by gnuvince »

MikeTaylor wrote: post #21

This is all very nice, but the fact that the article doesn't even _mention_ images or attachments shows how divorced it is from the reality of most people's email experience. I happily used emacs as my mail-reader from 1989 to about 2009 (first RMAIL mode, then VM). The increasing importance of non-text formats made it cumbersome, and I somewhat reluctantly switched to GMail. It's hard to imagine switching back now.

I started using Emacs's mu4e package for my email at work. It's mostly mail from Github about pull requests, so no fancy HTML or images in there. I also integrated a small shell script I wrote to fetch a patch from a private repo on Github, so that when I open an email, if there is a link to the pull req (e.g. https://github.com/org/repo/pull/123) I can open the patch directly inside Emacs. Since I don't like to review code in the browser, this is quite helpful to me. In addition, by staying in Emacs rather than going to Firefox, I am way less likely to open HN or lobste.rs and start reading.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#72

Post by chriswarbo »

torrent-of-ions wrote: post #18

I started using emacs for email back in my uni days. I used Dovecot to run an IMAP server locally which would get my mail when it could. This made it very quick in emacs because it wouldn't have to wait for any remote server. But, unfortunately, I had to go back to Thunderbird. With the exception of free software mailing lists, people simply do not know how to use email. Bottom quoting is the default. We can thank Mi…

> I used Dovecot to run an IMAP server locally which would get my mail when it could. This made it very quick in emacs because it wouldn't have to wait for any remote server.

I do a similar thing, but using mbsync to save into maildir. That way it's a simple cron job/systemd service to do the fetching, and Emacs/mutt/whatever can read the data without needing a server process to be running.

I used to use Gnus, but since it does everything in elisp it makes Emacs freeze :(

I now use mu4e, which uses an external command (mu) to query the maildir, so emacs remains responsive. My mail-fetching script also runs mu after mbsync's finished, to index any new messages.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#73

Post by morganvachon »

MikeTaylor wrote: post #21

This is all very nice, but the fact that the article doesn't even _mention_ images or attachments shows how divorced it is from the reality of most people's email experience. I happily used emacs as my mail-reader from 1989 to about 2009 (first RMAIL mode, then VM). The increasing importance of non-text formats made it cumbersome, and I somewhat reluctantly switched to GMail. It's hard to imagine switching back now.

It's a use case thing. I would argue that for most people who actually still use email for communication with peers, images and attachments are an afterthought. For images, we have image hosting sites, and for attachments we have a plethora of cloud hosting services that allow you to send a link instead of the entire attachment.

That said, there's a happy medium between console based email and bloated, buggy clients like Thunderbird. Claws Mail is a very old-school graphical client that supports modern email features, and it's about as tweakable as it gets.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#74

Post by pmontra »

taeric wrote: post #67
pmontra wrote: post #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 mai…

I quit reading work mail on my phone. Has been a huge sanity booster.

Do you only have work email?

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#76

Post by Santosh83 »

u801e wrote: post #34
torrent-of-ions wrote: post #18

I started using emacs for email back in my uni days. I used Dovecot to run an IMAP server locally which would get my mail when it could. This made it very quick in emacs because it wouldn't have to wait for any remote server. But, unfortunately, I had to go back to Thunderbird. With the exception of free software mailing lists, people simply do not know how to use email. Bottom quoting is the default. We can thank Mi…

> With the exception of free software mailing lists, people simply do not know how to use email. Bottom quoting is the default. We can thank Microsoft for that one, I think. I can't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to attach the previous message to the bottom. Most people just accept this as the way email is and never question how unbelievably stupid it is. I think a lot of email clients expect that t…

Though HN doesn't make it easy to do inline quoting. I tried it just now, only to have my nicely formatted text block overflow due to the browser's text area idiosyncrasies.

Most people actually don't quote at all. It's just that the majority of mail clients out there, including the Web ones, quote the message being replied to and position the cursor above it, and no one takes the effort reformat it, or remove it.

Software needs to make it easy to choose portions of the message and automatically quote them in replies. Currently the usability of that aspect is broken. You have to cut and paste manually. A lot of messaging systems don't even add '>' marks.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#77

Post by y4mi »

tambourine_man wrote: post #70
curiousGambler wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of two honest answers to this question, thank you. (The other is "I'm old enough to have been using text email since before graphical email clients were a thing and don't want to change.")

There's also another. Navigating TUI with Vim key bindings is very fast

i seriously doubt that its faster than the normal keyboard bindings and mouse. and i enable vim mode in any editor i use.

and even if it were the truth: navigating mail generally consumes the least time... actually reading the mail and deciding what to do about it takes way longer. another activity where a scroll wheel is invaluable.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#78

Post by szastupov »

I spent quiet some time setting up mutt or trying to make a real IDE out of vim or Emacs, but in the end it's just cargo cult and waste of time. There a modern email clients, IDEs, polished operating systems, etc., all built in this century. There is absolutely no need in wasting time scoring nerd points.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#79

Post by rekado »

MikeTaylor wrote: post #21

This is all very nice, but the fact that the article doesn't even _mention_ images or attachments shows how divorced it is from the reality of most people's email experience. I happily used emacs as my mail-reader from 1989 to about 2009 (first RMAIL mode, then VM). The increasing importance of non-text formats made it cumbersome, and I somewhat reluctantly switched to GMail. It's hard to imagine switching back now.

Like others here I'm using mu4e in Emacs and it does a fine job at displaying images. It can also switch to rendering the HTML email in the same buffer.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#80

Post by Maakuth »

MikeTaylor wrote: post #21

This is all very nice, but the fact that the article doesn't even _mention_ images or attachments shows how divorced it is from the reality of most people's email experience. I happily used emacs as my mail-reader from 1989 to about 2009 (first RMAIL mode, then VM). The increasing importance of non-text formats made it cumbersome, and I somewhat reluctantly switched to GMail. It's hard to imagine switching back now.

I've used Thunderbird, Gmail and now mutt for my e-mail needs, and so far I've liked mutt the best. For the communication I do via e-mail, it's very rare that the non-text content is very important, so the text only mode allows for more focused experience. Besides, Gmail is never far away, just a matter of opening (or finding) the browser tab.
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