Would be nice to modernize it by porting to Rust, thus reusing some of the libraries for network protocols, cryptography, file formats. It will allow developers to focus on the important things.
Mutt email client 25 years old
11–20 of 161 posts
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#12For console email, I still use Alpine. Can anyone elaborate on the benefits (if any) of switching to Mutt?
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#13Noooooo WAY. I started at Rice in '98 and remember using Pine on the Sun Solaris desktops spread all over campus. Of course I imagined Pine must be ancient software, and when someone told me to switch to Mutt halfway through college, I assumed it was just yet another super ancient program, not realizing it had been released when I was in high school!
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#14For console email, I still use Alpine. Can anyone elaborate on the benefits (if any) of switching to Mutt?
mutt is the best MUA for dealing with large quantities of email. The key to this is the limit/tag workflow.
(I wrote it up a few years ago here: https://blog.randomstring.org/2016/09/26/secrets-of-mutt/ )
In brief, you use the limit command to see only the email you are interested in, then use the tag command to do something to those specific messages. Both limit and tag use the same pattern language to specify From, Subject, date ranges, message numbers, or more esoteric searches.
The only thing mutt is not great at is searching multiple mailboxes, and it's easy to integrate an external tool (notmuch, maildir-utils, mairix...) to do that search and link the results into a temporary maildir that mutt will then work on.
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#15Would be nice to modernize it by porting to Rust, thus reusing some of the libraries for network protocols, cryptography, file formats. It will allow developers to focus on the important things.
It's open source, so you are totally welcome to do that thing. Enjoy yourself. Please call the resulting program something related to but not identical to mutt, such as rustmutt, rustydog, mutt-ferric-oxide, or whatever else makes you happy.
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#16One of the major reasons I use Gmail in the browser is because it’s in the browser: it’s always on the same tab and I can switch to it when I want to check it. I used Mutt (unsuccessfully) a few years ago since my other window that’s always open is a terminal emulator.
I wonder: should I fire up a Linux emulation in my browser and run Mutt inside that? I’m sure things have gotten fast enough that this would actually work.
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#17Noooooo WAY. I started at Rice in '98 and remember using Pine on the Sun Solaris desktops spread all over campus. Of course I imagined Pine must be ancient software, and when someone told me to switch to Mutt halfway through college, I assumed it was just yet another super ancient program, not realizing it had been released when I was in high school!
This has definitely been added to my list of things that I thought were far older than they were.
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similarly to sibling comment, I just set in mailcap: text/html; elinks -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput
The really annoying thing is that some mail is multipart where the text/plain is just “sorry, your email client does not support html”. Yeah thanks a lot but it does, it’s just I have it set to prefer text/plain, because I don’t want to look at the html dump version unless I have to. If those people had simply sent only text/html and not a useless text/plain that only says that kind of stuff then everything would hav…
I commend you for using “laziness” and “self hosted email” in the same sentence. I ran Mail-in-a-box a few years ago on a cheap VPS. Then I realized just how much I don’t want to do that. It was fun being my own email provider, even if it was only for a secondary account, but the risks definitely outweigh the benefits.
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#19One of the major reasons I use Gmail in the browser is because it’s in the browser: it’s always on the same tab and I can switch to it when I want to check it. I used Mutt (unsuccessfully) a few years ago since my other window that’s always open is a terminal emulator. I wonder: should I fire up a Linux emulation in my browser and run Mutt inside that? I’m sure things have gotten fast enough that this would actually…
I don't know about Gmail in the browser because I access it via IMAP and SMTP, but I have noticed that the browser process that's associated with tab that has the Google voice page open will occasionally start consuming a lot of CPU and memory resources to the point that I have to terminate the process.
This never happens with Thunderbird and is even less likely to happen with a TUI client like Mutt.
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#20One of the major reasons I use Gmail in the browser is because it’s in the browser: it’s always on the same tab and I can switch to it when I want to check it. I used Mutt (unsuccessfully) a few years ago since my other window that’s always open is a terminal emulator. I wonder: should I fire up a Linux emulation in my browser and run Mutt inside that? I’m sure things have gotten fast enough that this would actually…
I use mutt for Gmail in my terminal, the setup is fairly easy and documented across blog posts
example muttrc =========================================================
set imap_user = '@gmail.com'
set imap_authenticators="oauthbearer"
set imap_oauth_refresh_command="~/.mutt/oauth2.py --quiet --user=@gmail.com --client_id=.apps.googleusercontent.com --client_secret= --refresh_token="
set smtp_authenticators="oauthbearer"
set smtp_oauth_refresh_command="~/.mutt/oauth2.py --quiet --user=@gmail.com --client_id=.apps.googleusercontent.com --client_secret= --refresh_token="
set ssl_starttls=yes
set ssl_force_tls=yes
set imap_pass = 'my really hard to guess gmail password'
set from='@gmail.com'
set realname='Fancy pants name'
set folder = imaps://imap.gmail.com/
set spoolfile = +INBOX
set record = "+[Gmail]/Sent Mail"
set postponed = "+[Gmail]/Drafts"
set trash = "+[Gmail]/Trash"
set postponed="imaps://imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Drafts"
set header_cache = "~/.mutt/cache/headers"
set message_cachedir = "~/.mutt/cache/bodies"
set certificate_file = "~/.mutt/certificates"
set smtp_url = 'smtp://@gmail.com:@smtp.gmail.com:587/'
set smtp_pass = 'my really hard to guess password'
set move = no
set imap_keepalive = 900
#refresh every 10 seconds
set timeout=10
set mail_check=20
# allow mutt to open new imap connection automatically
unset imap_passive
# vim!
set editor=vim
# email sorting
set sort=threads
set sort_browser=reverse-date
set sort_aux=last-date-received
# handy macros
macro index gd "$postponed" "go to drafts"
macro index gs "$record" "go to sent"
macro index gi "$spoolfile" "go to inbox"
macro index gt "$trash" "go to trash"""
macro index tb s+[Gmail]/Trash
set noconfirmappend
set quit=ask-yes
=========================================================