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Switching to the Mutt Email Client

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Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#141

Post by Thaxll »

LaSombra wrote: post #37
oblio wrote: post #15

I feel that the folks that do this aren't working for big companies. In most big companies you can't really afford to do any email client shenanigans. You probably need to see HTML emails, handle calendar invites, etc.

The company I work for is big-ish, ~10k, and many use mutt, emacs, Thunderbird and some even use a mailing-list nntp with slrn. I think it all depends on which area of work you are in. For software engineering folks it works just fine. I for one use mutt and handle calendar invites with gcalcli, I can use LDAP lookup and HTML mails are converted using elinks and read inside mutt. If I want to see all the fanciness I…

I have hard time believing that more that 1% of a 10k employees company use Mutt.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#142

Post by _jal »

szastupov wrote: post #102
rekado wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is not just an editor and mention it next to vim or mutt indicates that you misunderstand what Emacs tries to be. Emacs gives you tight integration for everything that could possibly be represented as a buffer. Emacs is programmable glue between applications, a better "shell". The desire to do all things in Emacs is because Emacs lets you do it and because it reduces context switching. For more on why one would…

I get the point about Emacs being a OS, but don't you think it's kind of a dated clunky OS? Like "Mac OS 9" was, lacking memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking. Why would anyone want to be limited by technology when the rest of the world is moving forward?

It isn't uncommon to mistake 'new' with 'better'.

But, just as it is a mistake to blindly cling to the old and comfortable, neophilia is a trap in itself. And it is a bit amusing to watch, for instance, new crops of editors repeat the same mistakes old ones got through in whatever GUI drag is trendy is this week.

For your Mac OS comparison to make any sense, you'd have to point to something comparable to lacking memory protection. So... what would that be? I have a sneaking suspicion you mean GUI integration with whatever OS you use, but I'd like to be clear.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#143

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

kingosticks wrote: post #64
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My colleague makes these images-with-commentary emails every week. For when I need to view those, I hit `H` in mutt, which opens the email in my web browser. It's all quite painless really. https://github.com/jezen/dotfiles/blob/master/.mutt/muttrc#L...

That does sound like a possible work-around, I might try moving to mutt again. But what about when you want to create one of those yourself? Or to reply inline to parts of theirs? How is that handled, do you write HTML? One of the few reasons I have to mess around with NoMachine etc is for email, if I could get it in a terminal over ssh that'd be great. I did try a few years ago and after wasting a lot of time sortin…

I've started playing with building a drop-in replacement for msmtp that converts markdown to a multipart email, but honestly I never actually need to create these kinds of emails, so that little project is on the back-burner.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#144

Post by nextos »

preek wrote: post #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 ea…

Same here. I am a long time mutt user, but recently switched to gnus. Have you considered gnus instead of mu4e? Gnus is notoriously hard to set up, but I found it has some remarkable features.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#145

Post by athenot »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #126
imurray wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you do inline quoting, MS Outhouse web client thinks that everything after the beginning of the quotation is a copy of the previous message and folds the whole thing, meaning your recipients get back what looks like an empty message. Really. Gah; that explains it. Occasionally I get a reply saying "you just sent me a blank email", while the text of my email is quoted right there in the email they've just sent me!

The only correct response to that is, "No, I haven't. Please fix your email client, or learn how to use it properly."

That was my response 15 years ago. Unfortunately, I've lost that battle and moved on. There comes a point when trying to fight the common expectation leads to zero return.

(And yes, I miss the days where SMTP & NNTP servers would actually enforce the ratio of non-quoted lines vs. quotes lines, forcing users to trim the relevant parts of the message they are replying to.)

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#146

Post by mseebach »

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 I do find it interesting that people on Hacker news, Slashdot, and reddit will generally follow the convention of responding inline

Actually, they don't. Most posts don't quote their parent at all, it's a unitary response to the full parent post. Which is what bottom-quoting does - it doesn't actually quote the parent post, it leaves it in for reference (which makes sense because email clients, unlike HN, are pretty crap at keeping track of conversation threads).

Very few people communicate in the super-structured way that in-line quoting implies, that you go through an email sentence(/line/paragraph) by sentence(/..) and respond individually to them. It's super-arrogant, and thankfully getting very rare, to insist that your way, just because it was first, and then completely failed to catch on, is the one true way and people are "unbelievably stupid" to disagree with you.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#147

Post by ziotom78 »

branchless wrote: post #95
ziotom78 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to agree. After years using Thunderbird, I switched to mutt in 2015 and used it as my unique email client till a few months ago, when I switched back to Thunderbird. Despite its fantastic speed, the difficulty to handle attachments is what set me back. I am a researcher, and when my colleagues want to discuss results they have the nasty habit of sending plots and documents as email attachments. My most importa…

Mutt bg run: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ppt-attachments-in-mutt/

Thanks, this is indeed a nice idea. However, it reminds me of this comic:

https://xkcd.com/196/

:-)

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#148

Post by ihuman »

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 can't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to attach the previous message to the bottom

Do you mean as opposed to putting the previous message on the top, or not including the previous message at all?

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#149

Post by torrent-of-ions »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #126
imurray wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you do inline quoting, MS Outhouse web client thinks that everything after the beginning of the quotation is a copy of the previous message and folds the whole thing, meaning your recipients get back what looks like an empty message. Really. Gah; that explains it. Occasionally I get a reply saying "you just sent me a blank email", while the text of my email is quoted right there in the email they've just sent me!

The only correct response to that is, "No, I haven't. Please fix your email client, or learn how to use it properly."

I used to try this. Imagine being the only person using some weird text based thing instead of just simply using "email" (ie. logging on to webmail). Remember there is a huge number of people who have not used anything but webmail (like gmail).

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#150

Post by ajross »

ihuman wrote: post #148
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 can't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to attach the previous message to the bottom Do you mean as opposed to putting the previous message on the top, or not including the previous message at all?

Long-time internet tradition has the replies going inline with the quoted message, with judicious trimming of irrelevant bits. It's frustrating that this has to be explained in the modern world. Smart young developers exist who have literally never seen a discussion that works that way.
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