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Switching to the Mutt Email Client

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Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#131

Post by tambourine_man »

y4mi wrote: post #77
tambourine_man wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>navigating mail generally consumes the least time... actually reading the mail and deciding what to do about it takes way longer

Depends on the kind of email you receive.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#133

Post by uberchet »

mjhoy wrote: post #99
szastupov wrote: post #78

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.

> There is absolutely no need in wasting time scoring nerd points. Well said. But: I have been using mu4e + Emacs for email for about two years now. I would seriously recommend anyone who already uses Emacs -- and especially if you use org-mode -- to look into it. Not because you score nerd points for reading & composing email in Emacs (frankly, you look ridiculous) but because it might just hook in perfectly with yo…

I use emacs, but exclusively for orgmode. I thought about mutt years ago, and realized I get and receive too much mail with rich content for that to work.

How does an emacs window, even with mu4e, represent emails with meaningful formatting, inline graphics, etc? I'm guessing by launching an external viewer, but even that would slow me down quite a bit.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#134

Post by jeremy7600 »

chii wrote: post #23
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.

the only images i find are either from spammy adverts or tracking pixels. Normal people don't put images in emails. As for attachments, you can open them in their native programs just fine.

I work in Service Department. As a regular part of my job, I put images in emails. I have to show people how to do things, and putting them as attachments and not inline would not be helpful.

At my old job, as an engineer, I also put images inline. I got emails all the time, or calls, asking why is this? The easiest way to show someone is in an email, with a screenshot.

Its not any different than an article in a newspaper or on a webpage with an inline image. It actually just works.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#135

Post by jeremy7600 »

HurrdurrHodor wrote: post #75

"fiddling feels a lot more productive than it actually is" Best thing about this article. Unfortunately he didn't derive anything from this wise statement.

The logical extension is that he only feels more productive after his fiddling and this new setup he came up with, not actually more productive.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#136

Post by uberchet »

morganvachon wrote: post #73
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…

> I would argue that for most people who actually still use email for communication with peers, images and attachments are an afterthought.

Are you actually convinced of that, or are you being inflammatory? Because, in 2017, it's hilariously far afield of most folks' email use patterns both at work and at home. Do you only ever communicate using text -- and plain text at that?

I work for a small software company - ie, full of nerds. We use screencaps marked up in email ALL THE TIME to communicate about changes and whatnot. Sure, I guess we could put it in a Word doc or HTML doc, but why bother when we can do it in the email client?

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#137

Post by mjhoy »

uberchet wrote: post #133
mjhoy wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is absolutely no need in wasting time scoring nerd points. Well said. But: I have been using mu4e + Emacs for email for about two years now. I would seriously recommend anyone who already uses Emacs -- and especially if you use org-mode -- to look into it. Not because you score nerd points for reading & composing email in Emacs (frankly, you look ridiculous) but because it might just hook in perfectly with yo…

I use emacs, but exclusively for orgmode. I thought about mutt years ago, and realized I get and receive too much mail with rich content for that to work. How does an emacs window, even with mu4e, represent emails with meaningful formatting, inline graphics, etc? I'm guessing by launching an external viewer, but even that would slow me down quite a bit.

> represent emails with meaningful formatting

For basic formatting (bold text, headings, lists, links, etc etc), Emacs can render using its built in web browser. The "richer" it is, the more screwy the formatting gets. Usually you can at least read the emails.

You can easily pipe an email to your web browser of choice. This works fine but isn't exactly what you want to be doing all the time.

For my work, I am mostly dealing with plain text and attachments. The rich stuff is usually the email I care less about anyway. I don't think I'd want to use mu4e if I was dealing with rich content often. You can do it but it definitely slows you down.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#140

Post by _jal »

szastupov wrote: post #78

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.

I'm sorry it didn't work for you, but your hostility about it gives me the impression you became frustrated configuring advanced stuff that perhaps you don't understand or need. If you never, say, want to select a group of messages based on a regular expression, absolutely, stick with Outlook or whatever. If you never need different contextual handling (say, signing mail only from a particular account, add particular headers when sending to some address, etc.), then I'm sure the configurability looks stupid.

Put another way, you can complain that a pickup truck isn't a Prius, but you should expect people who use (not just drive) pickups to snicker.

I use mutt (and vim, but that's a different post) heavily because it saves me so much time. Sure, there's a learning curve, but there is no faster mail client out there for handling large volumes of mail.

Speed:

- It is entirely keyboard driven.

- Until you have >6 figures of mail in one mbox, every action is essentially instant. And then you only wait a bit on load/save.

- If you have to deal with automated mail systems and the occasional mail disasters caused by them, the regex manipulation is a godsend.

- I think people don't notice the little delays in GUIs, but when you're going through hundreds of messages, it adds up.

Other awesome features:

- If you ever have to deal with GPG, mutt is the place to configure it. I don't use it much, but it is part of the workflow for some open source projects. I've configured it in various GUI MUAs, and it seems like every time I do try to sign something, it broke in some annoying way. Mutt is loosely coupled enough that that doesn't happen.

- Works over ssh. Yes, this absolutely matters to me - can't live without it.

- Extremely extensible. Add a configurable MDA[1]. I've built entire little adhoc apps based on email for various purposes.

[1] I actually still use procmail, because the syntax ate by brain a long time ago, but I'd recommend something less obtuse if you're starting fresh.

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