Goofy email question number 1: Is there a good alternative to SpamAssassin? Something that doesn't use up quite so much memory?
Switching to the Mutt Email Client
221–230 of 246 posts
Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client
#222Earlier 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?
> Dozens of times a day I add someone to the cc list Incidentally, your daily dosage coincides with the amount of times I've had to do the same thing at all since I started using email some twenty five years ago. > It's an incredibly common use case For some, perhaps. On the other hand, I'd suggest that another, at least for me more common use case is to know exactly what is being replied to. Which is possible with p…
Incredibly common use case:
1) Hi there I have a request for a meeting or phone call, or need something from your organization.
2) Great, I'm copying my assistant who will schedule this, or the other person in the company who knows the answer to your question, who I have now handed this task off to nearly instantly and seamlessly.
Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
For most messaging in larger organisations, having "paper trail"-style replies that you can forward to others has its advantages -- it better delimits in a single page who said what, and when. If I know my conversation is intended to a small group I'll reply inline, but my default is quote-on-top.
That's still a stupid reason. There is a MIME type for emails, so you can attach emails to emails, retaining their identity as emails, so the receiving MUA can display the emails you receive as an attachment just like any other emails, including the user interface for replying to them, or whatever. Also, there is threading information in email headers. So, it is actually trivial to just gather together all the emails…
While arguably it's Gmail's fault, there are email clients, such as Gmail, that do not behave well with, or perhaps support at all, emails as attachments. When emailing people who use Gmail (as personal email or as the host of their work email), sending emails as attachments just doesn't work well.
Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client
#224Earlier 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…
>If you try to choose your words carefully and explain the situation to your recipient
Not always. Sometimes it's just easier to communicate the context by just copying them the thread. It might lead to shorter mails and less explaining.
Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
For most messaging in larger organisations, having "paper trail"-style replies that you can forward to others has its advantages -- it better delimits in a single page who said what, and when. If I know my conversation is intended to a small group I'll reply inline, but my default is quote-on-top.
> For most messaging in larger organisations, having "paper trail"-style replies that you can forward to others has its advantages That brings up another point about using email for group conversations. If organizations hosted their own NNTP servers and commonly installed email clients also supported communication via NNTP, then this wouldn't be a problem. All messages already posted to a group would be visible to an…
Has any organization (Fortune 500-style company) ever, in the history of the world, hosted its own NNTP server and expected employees to use it for communication? My guess is absolutely not.
Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client
#226I 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.
I do inline replies and all, but I still leave the quoted rest of the thread at the end of the message. If the recipient doesn't need it, they are free to ignore it. If the recipient needs it, then it's there. Many people don't use threaded email clients, or don't have access to the previous messages for whatever reason, and I don't want to second-guess how my recipient does things.
As long as it's clear where my reply ends and that there's nothing hidden at the end of the quoted previous messages, I really don't see the harm.
(About bandwidth or storage costs: they are negligible, and I do not think it is a good usage of time to worry about them.)
Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client
#227I've found every email client, mutt included, to be exceedingly difficult when trying to view your replies in the context of email thread. Gmail is the only one that does this seamlessly. If you get a ton of email, but never reply, or fire off so many replies that you never look back on them, maybe mutt works for you. For me the value of email and email clients is viewing the conversation as a thread, which importantly, must include my replies. You can find a few blog posts about configuring Mutt this way, it's complicated, convoluted, and always has side effects, like bcc'ing yourself. Outlook isn't all that much better in this regard as well, it does show your replies, but seems to loose them, or omit many from the thread.
Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For most messaging in larger organisations, having "paper trail"-style replies that you can forward to others has its advantages That brings up another point about using email for group conversations. If organizations hosted their own NNTP servers and commonly installed email clients also supported communication via NNTP, then this wouldn't be a problem. All messages already posted to a group would be visible to an…
Has any organization (Fortune 500-style company) ever, in the history of the world, hosted its own NNTP server and expected employees to use it for communication? My guess is absolutely not.
I suspect yes, because Lotus Notes was briefly very fashionable for corporate communication, and apparently supported NNTP, according to this article (PC Magazine, 24 Feb 1998):
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=C5-l28dcz50C&pg=PA186&lp...
(if the link doesn't work, search for NNTP Lotus Notes)
Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client
#229I use alot (to view and send mail) + notmuch (to index) + mbsync/isync (to retrieve mail). It was painful to configure, mostly due to needing scripts for syncing up tags with IMAP folders. So far its been worth it. Instantaneous search of all my email ever. With a properly configured mailcap file HTML emails are rendered ok (still have problems with links) and attachments open in external programs as well. Since `alo…
Same here. I ended up writing a wrapper for alot (and a custom MDA): https://github.com/jakeogh/gpgmda (just split the client stuff into gpgmda-client, see the client side deps list)
Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client
#230Earlier 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…
> 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…
I was under the impression that most software houses and tech startups migrated to Slack or similar group messaging long ago, which offers much better handling of attachments and collaboration. Email is still heavily used in government, mostly on Exchange servers, and I can see attachments being a big thing there (I work for local government and that's our setup). In the home consumer world, it's nearly all iMessage/Hangouts/SMS/WhatsApp etc.
Again, these are my observations and perhaps my window isn't big enough.