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Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

aerc-mail.org

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Re: Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

#71

Post by ddevault »

megous wrote: post #68
ddevault wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

aerc doesn't download all of your message headers upfront - mutt does. All that time you spend waiting for mutt to open your inbox is downloading all of the data that aerc is downloading as you scroll. Also, you can scroll faster with ^d/^u, half a page at a time, or pgup/pgdown, for a full page at a time. Yes, aerc is not yet as featureful or mature as mutt, but it definitely does not have inferior performance.

I use POP3, and only wait for mutt when changing to a folder (4s/100k mails). Then everything is basically instantaneous. But yeah, I don't know about mutt IMAP performance, as I never used it. I've only configured a local IMAP server over my maildir to be able to try aerc. I have no clue why aerc is taking 100-200ms to load a single message (as you see in the video) from the localhost. Maybe naggle (is it even used…

I'm guessing the main problem is that I can't cancel an IMAP request once it goes out. When you scroll down, one at a time, through all of the messages like that, I have to wait for ones that scrolled offscreen long ago before I can read out the details for the ones onscreen now. Adding an option to fetch all headers when opening a folder might be wise, or just fetching the offscreen headers in the background while idle. Another thing some email clients do is open several IMAP connections, but pooling connections to implement cancellation could get icky.

aerc will also support maildir before 1.0, which doesn't have the same issue, and will be at least as fast as mutt.

>Also, I'm not sure how you'd make threads work while loading message list only partially. So full load of the message list is needed anyway (at least once and cache it locally). It's not some failing. I want thread that started 5 months ago to pop forward if new message is posted to it.

IMAP has a thread extension I intend to put to good use for this purpose.

Re: Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

#72

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

sulfastor wrote: post #70

Why account passwords are stored on plaintext after the wizard? How do you encrypt them while configuring?

man aerc-imap for details, you can specify an external command to run. The creds file is chmod 600, and most other email clients (e.g. thunderbird) are also storing your creds in plaintext - it's just less obvious cause they put them in sqlite or something.

Re: Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

#73

Post by cjbprime »

ddevault wrote: post #63
cjbprime wrote: post #61

Neat! I used to be a kernel maintainer, and had a similar setup going inside emacs with gnus, and dvc-git commands bound to keys to apply patches. Here's an old blog post about some of it: https://blog.printf.net/articles/2010/10/04/git-patches-in-g... Gnus was too slow, but worse, emacs is single-threaded, so e.g. polling for new mail in the background blocked the rest of the editor while it happened. I never unders…

Hey, would you mind writing up some details about your email setup for kernel work to sir@cmpwn.com? I'd like to understand more email-driven workflows, especially from kernel maintainers, to guide aerc's design.

Hm! I can't think of much to add, except.. the next thing I would've worked on might've been to integrate a client for https://patchwork.kernel.org/ to keep it in sync and mark patches there as handled.

Re: Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

#74

Post by tzs »

How easy is it to tell it what IMAP folders to use for sent mail, deleted mail, and drafts?

A while back, I engaged in epic combat against Apple Mail on my Mac, Apple's iOS mail app on my iPhone, Outlook on my Mac, Outlook on my gaming PC, Outlook on my Surface Pro 4, and Thunderbird on my Mac to banish the blight of, e.g., Sent, Sent Mail, and Sent Messages, and similar for drafts and deleted.

It was an epic struggle, but I finally got them to all agree on Sent, Trash, Drafts (and Junk for spam). I'm not going near any other email client now without being sure I can tell it to use those before I let it have access to my IMAP.

Re: Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

#75

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

tzs wrote: post #74

How easy is it to tell it what IMAP folders to use for sent mail, deleted mail, and drafts? A while back, I engaged in epic combat against Apple Mail on my Mac, Apple's iOS mail app on my iPhone, Outlook on my Mac, Outlook on my gaming PC, Outlook on my Surface Pro 4, and Thunderbird on my Mac to banish the blight of, e.g., Sent, Sent Mail, and Sent Messages, and similar for drafts and deleted. It was an epic struggl…

Easy, you can change what folder it treats as sent. It doesn't have a trash bin (and it won't) or draft support (and it will) yet.

Re: Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

#77

Post by ddevault »

cjbprime wrote: post #73
ddevault wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, would you mind writing up some details about your email setup for kernel work to sir@cmpwn.com? I'd like to understand more email-driven workflows, especially from kernel maintainers, to guide aerc's design.

Hm! I can't think of much to add, except.. the next thing I would've worked on might've been to integrate a client for https://patchwork.kernel.org/ to keep it in sync and mark patches there as handled.

Thanks! I wonder if you've seen my work with mailing lists on sourcehut, by the way?

https://sourcehut.org

I'm working on a replacement for patchwork. Here's an example of a thread which was rendered with my tool, which is just generated from organic mail threads without extra human intervention:

https://lists.sr.ht/~philmd/qemu/patches/5556

If you have more feedback or thoughts around this, I'd love to hear it too :)

Re: Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

#79

Post by ddevault »

tobias2014 wrote: post #78

What about full text search? This feature has brought me to from mutt to sup to alot: https://alot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

notmuch support is planned! It shouldn't be too hard, if an interested user were to take ownership over the feature it could probably ship in 0.2.0. Want to help?

Re: Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

#80

Post by ajdlinux »

cjbprime wrote: post #73
ddevault wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, would you mind writing up some details about your email setup for kernel work to sir@cmpwn.com? I'd like to understand more email-driven workflows, especially from kernel maintainers, to guide aerc's design.

Hm! I can't think of much to add, except.. the next thing I would've worked on might've been to integrate a client for https://patchwork.kernel.org/ to keep it in sync and mark patches there as handled.

A Patchwork client (well, a tool that does some of the more useful patchwork status updating, it's not a full client as such) for notmuch, which has a number of kernel dev users: https://github.com/stewart-ibm/pwnm-sync
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