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Mutt email client 25 years old

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Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#141

Post by u801e »

roel_v wrote: post #140
u801e wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use Thunderbird and it's installed on multiple machines where I have it configured to access the same email account via IMAP. I never really had a problem with out of sync mail and searches are done locally on the machine rather than on the server. I don't have it configured to use Maildir, but the files that store messages are in plain text and I could use grep on them if I wanted to.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#142

Post by stjohnswarts »

wazoox wrote: post #129
kleiba wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm amazed that you haven't had that experience yet. Years ago, when the web was less commonly used, it was pretty much frowned upon to send HTML emails. These days, it's almost the opposite: people asks "what's wrong with you" when you use a text-only email client (setting).

I use Claws, never ever sent an HTML email, and nobody complained so far.

Nobody really cares at any of the places I've worked either. I'm usually using company computers and one of the first things I do in the email client is set it to text

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#143

Post by stjohnswarts »

layer8 wrote: post #130
dancek wrote: 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…

I do the same, mutt for personal email and web browser based for others (usually work provided email). I always keep work and private emails separate and correct people when they try to intermingle them (know me in RL as well as at work)

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#144

Post by jlokier »

leephillips wrote: post #117
kleiba wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm amazed that you haven't had that experience yet. Years ago, when the web was less commonly used, it was pretty much frowned upon to send HTML emails. These days, it's almost the opposite: people asks "what's wrong with you" when you use a text-only email client (setting).

I use mutt, never send html emails; nobody has ever commented on this, in over 20 years.

I use Mutt too.

Although nobody has commented on my mails, I know some people read them on mobile, and because plain text is formatted for an 80-column terminal, it doesn't reflow nicely on their mobile devices so they have to scroll side-to-side to read my message.

I think people don't know that's because I use Mutt, but a hard-to-read mail is not an impression I want to convey sometimes.

Also, sometimes my mails render in Courier font for some people when regular HTML mails show up in Arial, just because of the content type.

So if possible I'd like to write Markdown or similar and have that auto-formatted to HTML mail before sending. Not sure if there's a good way to do that in Mutt.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#145

Post by jlokier »

DNied wrote: post #49
dsr_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> use the limit command to see only the email you are interested in, then use the tag command Just for clarity: you can just tag without limiting first > it's easy to integrate an external tool (notmuch, maildir-utils, mairix...) grep...

> grep...

Grepping my 47GB mail folder often takes longer than I'd like.

Notmuch is impressively near instant for the same searches.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#146

Post by toothbrush »

jlokier wrote: post #144
leephillips wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use mutt, never send html emails; nobody has ever commented on this, in over 20 years.

I use Mutt too. Although nobody has commented on my mails, I know some people read them on mobile, and because plain text is formatted for an 80-column terminal, it doesn't reflow nicely on their mobile devices so they have to scroll side-to-side to read my message. I think people don't know that's because I use Mutt, but a hard-to-read mail is not an impression I want to convey sometimes. Also, sometimes my mails re…

It's funny this should come up on HN today, because just this week out of nowhere i thought i'd try Mutt again (after having been a Mutt user since mid-2000s, but switching to mu4e for the last ±5 years).

What i used to do back in the day, and appeared to work fine when i tested this weekend, is so-called flowed mode. [1] I think it's a controversial feature, because it's a brittle hack, but anecdotally an email i sent this weekend as a test displayed fine on an iPhone.

And indeed, i'm totally with you on wanting to use/send text email but not look like a freak with weirdly broken 80-char lines in paragraphs.

1. https://rinzewind.org/blog-en/2017/a-small-trick-for-sending...

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#147

Post by leephillips »

jlokier wrote: post #144
leephillips wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use mutt, never send html emails; nobody has ever commented on this, in over 20 years.

I use Mutt too. Although nobody has commented on my mails, I know some people read them on mobile, and because plain text is formatted for an 80-column terminal, it doesn't reflow nicely on their mobile devices so they have to scroll side-to-side to read my message. I think people don't know that's because I use Mutt, but a hard-to-read mail is not an impression I want to convey sometimes. Also, sometimes my mails re…

Interesting point. I can only do very limited testing, but I just sent an email with one very long line from mutt on my laptop to my gmail address. The long line was not broken, and the display flowed perfectly on the gmail client on Android.

I think you should be able to use a hook in Mutt to process the markdown to HTML (using Pandoc) before sending. I've never tried anything like this—it has interesting possibilities.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#148

Post by sameerds »

bravura wrote: post #111
feanaro wrote: 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…

Strangely, that's entirely the opposite of what I understood from the original comment. To me, "you can just use XXX" sounds like someone just told me that "all you need is XXX; don't worry it's simple". The assumption is that the HN'er saying it and the HN'er being said to share an implicit level of expertise since we are all talking about mutt here.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#149

Post by u801e »

layer8 wrote: post #137
u801e wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The quoted material is important, because people expect to be able to retrace the conversation within the single message.

Given the proliferation of rendering a thread of messages and showing them as a conversation (i.e., conversation view), reading the quoted material within the same message is not really necessary.

> 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.

While I have seen this done in threads where people follow the conventions of a typical mailing list or usenet newsgroup by replying inline and quoting only parts of the text they're responding to, I have not seen the equivalent in a threaded conversation in outlook. And, as you note:

> Outlook also doesn't have a great UX for that.

While they have addressed the UX issue to some extent with the conversation view, it still doesn't really lend itself to easily following the discussion amongst multiple people due to the fact that they don't typically use different subthreads under the same email chain.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#150

Post by DNied »

jlokier wrote: post #144
leephillips wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use mutt, never send html emails; nobody has ever commented on this, in over 20 years.

I use Mutt too. Although nobody has commented on my mails, I know some people read them on mobile, and because plain text is formatted for an 80-column terminal, it doesn't reflow nicely on their mobile devices so they have to scroll side-to-side to read my message. I think people don't know that's because I use Mutt, but a hard-to-read mail is not an impression I want to convey sometimes. Also, sometimes my mails re…

It's entirely possible to send mail as format=flowed plain text, so that messages will rewrap nicely on any screen. I do it all the time with Mutt, it's actually very easy.
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