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Mutt email client 25 years old

mutt.org

131–140 of 161 posts

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#131
post #115

Another extremely happy user of the following combination waves hi: • Mutt • OfflineIMAP (to be replaced with `mbsync`; OfflineIMAP is not being ported to Python 3, unfortunately) • Notmuch — for fast indexing, searching, and tagging e-mails • Postfix — Mail Transfer Agent; offline queuing. Overall, it's one of the most robust pieces of software; Postfix never failed even once on me in nearly six years.

mbsync is far superior in resource usage and speed compared to OfflineIMAP, python3 would not help with that. combined with fdm filtering/sorting/archiving the speed has been incredible.

Noted on the efficient resource usage.

My mentioning of Python 3 was not related to resource usage. It was in context of Python 2 being deprecated.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#132

Shout out to davmail , an IMAP proxy that sits between mutt (or any other IMAP client) and Outlook365. Davmail handles Outlook’s Modern Authentication , and launches a browser when a 2FA challenge/response is required. The latest version of davmail can cache authentication keys meaning you only have to go through 2FA once. It’s been a real joy to return to mutt, in my latest job where Outlook is deployed, after years…

Thank you for this - i know what I'm setting up Monday.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#133
post #83

Another extremely happy user of the following combination waves hi: • Mutt • OfflineIMAP (to be replaced with `mbsync`; OfflineIMAP is not being ported to Python 3, unfortunately) • Notmuch — for fast indexing, searching, and tagging e-mails • Postfix — Mail Transfer Agent; offline queuing. Overall, it's one of the most robust pieces of software; Postfix never failed even once on me in nearly six years.

Same here, though I moved to mbsync a few years ago and I need to check out postfix. It is such a great email client that I feel lost and walking through treacle using anything else. I don't work in the tech field, but I have a lot of emails to deal with. People come to me now to ask me if I can find specific important emails from a while ago that they are after. Outlook is hilariously bad at searching. I wish I coul…

If 'msmtp' is working for your use case, just don't fix it. :-) (Although, someone here might be able give a comparative rundown.)

I just deal with a lot of email volume - large portion of it public mailing lists; Postfix has been a trusted comrade.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#134
post #130
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great example of the HN use of the word "just".

The real problem though is not preserving the rich-text-ness of the quoted message when replying, and the inability to have inline images. I use Outlook at work and mutt for private email. Using mutt at work just wouldn’t be practical, as the text markup and inline images are often critical to the exchange. On a related note, while I love the UX of mutt, I do find proportional fonts to be significantly more readable…

> The real problem though is not preserving the rich-text-ness of the quoted message when replying,

Given the near ubiquitous use of top-posting and quoting the entire message that's being replied to, it stands to reason that others are not really reading the quoted material and are just reading the response on top.

> and the inability to have inline images

I wonder when email clients like Outlook would start rendering images based on a URL included in the message, similar to what Slack does. That could allow one to effectively include an inline image, which would be seen as a URL in other clients.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#135
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you are implying. That it is hard? It is only a single line added to the `mailcap` file: text/html; firefox '%s' &; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; needsterminal; After that's in place, you simply open attachments (via `view-attachments`) and call `view-attach` (usually via a key binding) on the HTML attachment.

You just used the word “simply” in the same was as you used the word “just”. The argument GP was making is that what is obvious to one reader may not be obvious to another. So using the words “simply” or “just” or “obviously” does not add information, except to signal that you feel the reader is ignorant if they are not aware of what you’re explaining. My PhD advisor always crossed these words out of my scientific wr…

> The argument GP was making is that what is obvious to one reader may not be obvious to another.

Regardless of the argument, it's not obvious to anyone unless they've taken the time to read the documentation and possibly read through some examples. While there are those who may feel that it's simple and/or obvious after they have gained that knowledge, it shouldn't relieve anyone of the responsibility to read documentation and figure these things out for any tool that they use.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#136
post #81
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you are implying. That it is hard? It is only a single line added to the `mailcap` file: text/html; firefox '%s' &; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; needsterminal; After that's in place, you simply open attachments (via `view-attachments`) and call `view-attach` (usually via a key binding) on the HTML attachment.

That's fine when you run mutt on your local machine, but the whole reason to use mutt is so that you have a dedicated email machine that you can ssh into and use screen to access email from anywhere. And then things like this become 10x harder (I never found a way, although last I tried was 15+ years ago). Attachments, too.

If mutt is accessing email via IMAP, why would you need a dedicated machine for accessing email?

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#137
post #134
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem though is not preserving the rich-text-ness of the quoted message when replying, and the inability to have inline images. I use Outlook at work and mutt for private email. Using mutt at work just wouldn’t be practical, as the text markup and inline images are often critical to the exchange. On a related note, while I love the UX of mutt, I do find proportional fonts to be significantly more readable…

> The real problem though is not preserving the rich-text-ness of the quoted message when replying, Given the near ubiquitous use of top-posting and quoting the entire message that's being replied to, it stands to reason that others are not really reading the quoted material and are just reading the response on top. > and the inability to have inline images I wonder when email clients like Outlook would start renderi…

The quoted material is important, because people expect to be able to retrace the conversation within the single message. Technical (and also nontechnical) exchanges often consist of a dozen messages about a particular topic spread over weeks or sometimes months, where at almost each step you want to go back in the conversation to look at details of the previous discussion or to refresh your memory. Outlook users are used to doing so by scrolling through the message. They are generally not used to having to bring up the correct previous message -- Outlook also doesn't have a great UX for that.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#138
post #103
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find bower to be better than mutt at dealing with large quantities of email, but mutt is better at everything else. bower can also run locally with a mailbox on a remote, which allows things like easy seamless opening of attachments that don't work as well in a terminal (images, PDFs, &c.).

Mutt works with 250,000 message maildirs. Does bower? Conveniently?

My largest maildir only has 80k, but bower works with it quite conveniently.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#139

Another extremely happy user of the following combination waves hi: • Mutt • OfflineIMAP (to be replaced with `mbsync`; OfflineIMAP is not being ported to Python 3, unfortunately) • Notmuch — for fast indexing, searching, and tagging e-mails • Postfix — Mail Transfer Agent; offline queuing. Overall, it's one of the most robust pieces of software; Postfix never failed even once on me in nearly six years.

I can recommend https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter . I have it running in a private serving, filtering the emails for me..

Thank you; will check it out.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#140
post #136
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine when you run mutt on your local machine, but the whole reason to use mutt is so that you have a dedicated email machine that you can ssh into and use screen to access email from anywhere. And then things like this become 10x harder (I never found a way, although last I tried was 15+ years ago). Attachments, too.

If mutt is accessing email via IMAP, why would you need a dedicated machine for accessing email?

Why would anyone use mutt when you can have 'local' (ie on a machine you ssh into) Maildirs? That's one of the selling points for using mutt. Imap sucks, it's just something we have to put up with for lack of something better, but I've never searched mail as fast as when I could just grep for what I needed.
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