Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Switching to the Mutt Email Client

nullprogram.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 246 posts

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#191

Post by jolmg »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #164
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…

Do you use GMail? If so, how much pain is was to configure your setup to connect to it reliably? And handle multiple e-mail accounts? I ask, because in the past I toyed with switching to using Emacs as my e-mail client, but aways got stuck on configuring the whole setup to work reliably and seamlessly.

One trouble I had while configuring for my gmail account was the lacking support for Google's XOAUTH extension for SMTP and IMAP authentication. After a little research, I found that you can create app passwords[0] in Google after you've activated 2FA. This allowed me to use standard PLAIN authentication with passwords that don't allow for management of the whole google account.

[0] - https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#192

Post by erikb »

uberchet wrote: post #190
erikb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

attachments yes, but images? There's literally zero reason to have any images in emails. Use Dropbox/Owncloud/Instagram/etc links if you want to share pictures. That's more handy for other people anyway instead of handling 2 gig of attachments for seeing your email on their smart phone.

"Literally zero reason?" Seriously? I submit your understanding of how email works for most people in 2017 is outdated. Email with inline images is common, useful, and not going anywhere.

Over the last 10 years I have worked with 4 digits worth of people. Managers, sales people, engineers, family members, locals, Western foreigners, Arab foreigners, Asian foreigners. I can't remember a single communication where direct insertion of images was a desired feature. If at all images were in emails because the email clients interpreted adding attachments in image format as part of the emails content (gmail client for instance).

I'd argue that images in emails means that you haven't reached 2017 yet, where there are loads of better options to share images.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#193

Post by sverige »

ajross wrote: post #150
ihuman wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

FWIW, OpenBSD mailing lists still (mostly) follow this convention, for the curious "smart young developers."

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#194

Post by hibbelig »

bananaboy wrote: post #62
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 agree, it's a losing battle. Such a shame. I have one or two friends who quote inline, and I love getting emails from them. They look so clean and readable. But it's pointless trying to do it with most people because most people don't reply with inline quotes and just top post and it ends up as a godawful mess. So I barely even bother any more myself. I die a little every time.

I switched to Outlook because I got too many "see my comments in orange below" :-(

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#195

Post by uberchet »

erikb wrote: post #192
uberchet wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Literally zero reason?" Seriously? I submit your understanding of how email works for most people in 2017 is outdated. Email with inline images is common, useful, and not going anywhere.

Over the last 10 years I have worked with 4 digits worth of people. Managers, sales people, engineers, family members, locals, Western foreigners, Arab foreigners, Asian foreigners. I can't remember a single communication where direct insertion of images was a desired feature. If at all images were in emails because the email clients interpreted adding attachments in image format as part of the emails content (gmail…

I'd argue, in turn, that your experience, regardless of how many people were involved, is divergent from the way in which email itself is moving in the broader market of users.

Images as links to something else, that require an additional step, are an inferior substitute to inline images. Here in 2017, it's possible to build an email that includes tables or screenshots or other rich media that exist as part of the email itself.

This is commonly viewed as a benefit. 20 years ago, I, too, was resistant to the idea that email should be something other than plain text, but I was wrong. That ship has saild. Email today is a rich document, and rich documents often include meaningful inline images that should be stored with the document.

Again, that YOU don't like this doesn't mean it's not useful or widely used by other people.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#196

Post by TeMPOraL »

jolmg wrote: post #191
TeMPOraL wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use GMail? If so, how much pain is was to configure your setup to connect to it reliably? And handle multiple e-mail accounts? I ask, because in the past I toyed with switching to using Emacs as my e-mail client, but aways got stuck on configuring the whole setup to work reliably and seamlessly.

One trouble I had while configuring for my gmail account was the lacking support for Google's XOAUTH extension for SMTP and IMAP authentication. After a little research, I found that you can create app passwords[0] in Google after you've activated 2FA. This allowed me to use standard PLAIN authentication with passwords that don't allow for management of the whole google account. [0] - https://myaccount.google.com/app…

Yeah, I just bounced off that when trying out OfflineIMAP; thanks, setting a new app password helped.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#197

Post by TeMPOraL »

avar wrote: post #179
TeMPOraL wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use GMail? If so, how much pain is was to configure your setup to connect to it reliably? And handle multiple e-mail accounts? I ask, because in the past I toyed with switching to using Emacs as my e-mail client, but aways got stuck on configuring the whole setup to work reliably and seamlessly.

I use Emacs + mu4e with 2 GMail accounts (personal & work). AMA I guess. I use OfflineIMAP to sync the two accounts to ~/Maildir/{work,personal}, then mu4e-context to switch between settings for the two. I entirely outsource actually sending the mail to a local exim4 daemon which is configured to forward through a GMail smarthost. IMNSHO this is much better than the recommended default configuration of making Emacs a…

Thanks for the tips. I'm trying OfflineIMAP now (it's syncing... there's few gigs of e-mail to sync...).

I'll definitely consider your trick for sending e-mail - I definitely value both Emacs not hanging and also having the ability to send e-mails off-line.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#198

Post by JdeBP »

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

Many years ago, a mail reader, whose name temporarily eludes me, touted as one of its features that for the most common use case it could be driven with just two fingers on the numeric keypad, one for the enter key (which paged down and went to the next message) and one for the Del/. key (which skipped threads).

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#199

Post by __jal »

Longhanks wrote: post #88
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.

While email has evolved from plain text to mostly HTML (apart from mailing lists), code still ist text only. Vim is a perfectly valid text editor and productivity in software engineering is not defined by how much your IDE can do.

> While email has evolved from plain text to mostly HTML

You must have a very different set of correspondents than I do. About the only non-bulk, non-plain text mail I get is when the office manager sticks a cute .gif in an announcement.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#200

Post by catdog »

icebraining wrote: post #123
sotojuan wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of attitude is not helpful. Sometimes even tech people want things that work "good enough" with no configuration or thinking involved. No need to go full normie.

I'm not trying to be helpful. But I find this worry about having to configure CLI tools to be overstated. Just because they allow you to configure everything doesn't mean you have to. My personal email setup is: "sudo apt install alpine", configure account info, done. You don't even have to memorize the action keys, Alpine shows the available actions for the current screen at the bottom, with helpful labels. It's arg…

Sadly thats not the norm. A lot of those (otherwise great) text tools ship with horrible defaults and suffer from poor discoverability. Sometimes it's both combined and somebody actually contributed such an improvement but nobody bothered to turn it on.
Post reply on HN