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Switching to the Mutt Email Client

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Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#211

Post by rayvd »

Thaxll wrote: post #141
LaSombra wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They probably also use Outlook. That's what I do (4K employees). Used to use Mutt almost exclusively, but just became too hard and people complained about my emails turning everything to Courier. :)

I still use Mutt to quickly prune emails in the AM and for writing to mailing lists.

I've (sadly) gotten pretty used to Outlook and like it quite a bit. I do miss using vim to edit emails though...

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#212

Post by szastupov »

pyre wrote: post #163
szastupov wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Operating systems that pre-dated MacOS 9 had pre-emptive multitasking. MacOS "moved forward" by adopting one of them (NeXT OS) and building their platform on top of it. I'm really unsure what point you're trying to make here.

I'm trying to say, that at that period of time, MacOS 9 was stuck in the past, even compared to Windows. This was in reference to Emacs limitations as a platform.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#213

Post by wahern »

CPLX wrote: post #188
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…

> My message to you is right there in the same thread in my client. Don't send it back to me. Dozens of times a day I add someone to the cc list when I'm replying to an email. I suspect most people that have an assistant (or are one, or collaborate with others in general) do this constantly. It's an incredibly common use case. Should we all abandon this very common behavior in order to avoid your scorn?

With inline quoting the relevant content of the conversation is immediately and easily discernible. You may Cc people with a whole copy of the thread, but IME nobody bothers reading through. For one thing, it's in reverse order so very difficult to follow.

OTOH, inline quoting was always destined to fail. It requires that you purposefully and carefully edit and reply in the appropriate places. That's asking too much of the vast majority of people. B

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#214

Post by rayvd »

extra88 wrote: post #96
morganvachon wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> for attachments we have a plethora of cloud hosting services that allow you to send a link instead of the entire attachment. Is there an email client that, when you drag a file icon into the composition window, doesn't attach the file but instead uploads the file to cloud storage and inserts a link? Now that I think about it, that's basically what Apple Mail's Mail Drop feature does (file is uploaded to iCloud, I t…

Box for Outlook does this....

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#215

Post by wahern »

CPLX wrote: post #188
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…

> My message to you is right there in the same thread in my client. Don't send it back to me. Dozens of times a day I add someone to the cc list when I'm replying to an email. I suspect most people that have an assistant (or are one, or collaborate with others in general) do this constantly. It's an incredibly common use case. Should we all abandon this very common behavior in order to avoid your scorn?

With inline quoting the relevant content of the conversation is immediately and easily discernible. You may Cc people with a whole copy of the thread at the bottom, but IME nobody bothers reading through. For one thing, it's in reverse order so very difficult to follow. It will also contain all the irrelevant parts of the discussion, which in a long thread will be the vast majority of the quote, thus making it even more burdensome to wade through. Part-and-parcel of inline quoting is pruning.

OTOH, inline quoting was always destined to fail. It requires that one purposefully and carefully edit the thread and reply in the appropriate place. That's asking too much of the vast majority of people. Perhaps it could have been preserved to a greater extent had Microsoft Outlook not effectively forced bottom quoting, but alas that ship sailed decades ago.

  --
  A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
  Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?
  A: Top-posting.
  Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in email?

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#216

Post by preek »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #204
preek wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here. I'm not using Gmail (anymore), but not because it was hard to set up(; I'm using Mu4e with 4 different mail accounts, though and it's completely seamless and easy to compose. If you're interested, you can check out my configuration (which is written in literate org-mode so it's actually easy to read^^): https://github.com/munen/emacs.d/blob/master/configuration.o...

Thanks for the config. I'll be getting to setting up mu4e after the OfflineIMAP sync finishes (some time this week, hopefully ;)). How's your experience with literate config, in terms of managing it? I've been meaning to switch from my mess of individual files to something like this for a time now.

I'm using offlineimap, too. It's not running longer than a program like Mail.app when it has been synched once. The first run, of course, might take a while if you have lots of mails(;

Regarding literate configuration: It's been super easy, honestly. I used to have a longer init.el (formerly super long vim.rc^^). Once I wrote a short macro that converted comments into new headings in org to get me started. Then, every time I touch something, I just add a little more documentation to guide me and others for the next time. It's not more work than writing a regular init.el with comments, but the result is so much more powerful (folding->refactoring, documentation on Github, etc).

Can only recommend it, at least for Elisp.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#217

Post by Gracana »

CPLX wrote: post #188
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…

> My message to you is right there in the same thread in my client. Don't send it back to me. Dozens of times a day I add someone to the cc list when I'm replying to an email. I suspect most people that have an assistant (or are one, or collaborate with others in general) do this constantly. It's an incredibly common use case. Should we all abandon this very common behavior in order to avoid your scorn?

I don't think that copying an entire email thread to someone is an effective way of communicating. It's just a way to cover your ass. If you try to choose your words carefully and explain the situation to your recipient, then you have to take some responsibility for their understanding. If you just copy them the 200 prior emails, you've "done your job." The responsibility to understand is now theirs.

This is a great strategy for protecting yourself in business, but it makes everything slower and more difficult for everyone else.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#218

Post by _acme »

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…

MS Outhouse? Really? Are you a 13 year old boy in 2003? Your message shows that you've never used email in a corporate setting, where people cc other people (who will need copies of the previous correspondence) all the time, and people might take you more seriously if you leave out the Micro$oft 'jokes'.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#219

Post by Jtsummers »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #187
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. Most people just accept this as the way email is and never question how unbelievably stupid it is. In addition to the obvious idiocy of sending someone a copy of what they just sent you ... I think it's funny to realize how this behaviour actually has quadratic space and bandwidth complexity: If a thread is 10 mes…

And with Outlook, if you have a large TO or CC field that gets included at the top of the quoted message. Some dopes started reply-all chain at work a year or two back. After 3 or 4 messages it was a several MB message being sent to 1000 people.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#220

Post by CPLX »

Gracana wrote: post #217
CPLX wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My message to you is right there in the same thread in my client. Don't send it back to me. Dozens of times a day I add someone to the cc list when I'm replying to an email. I suspect most people that have an assistant (or are one, or collaborate with others in general) do this constantly. It's an incredibly common use case. Should we all abandon this very common behavior in order to avoid your scorn?

I don't think that copying an entire email thread to someone is an effective way of communicating. It's just a way to cover your ass. If you try to choose your words carefully and explain the situation to your recipient, then you have to take some responsibility for their understanding. If you just copy them the 200 prior emails, you've "done your job." The responsibility to understand is now theirs. This is a great…

> This is a great strategy for protecting yourself in business

Yup. I believe you've reinforced my point.

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