Live data from Hacker News

Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt

git.meli.delivery

1–10 of 78 posts

Re: Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt

#3
My very first email account (when starting university in the early 90s) was via Pine on a unix machine; and i loved it! Sure, the excitement of "a new tech thing" was there, but also the fast, productive simplicity of it all: i can send a message to someone anywhere in the world quite easily! Years later when i started getting into linux as my personal machine/daily driver, i tried using mutt. Mutt didn't stick for me then. I give mutt (and other terminal clients like it) tons of respect, but for me it has been more an issue on my preference side; and nothing against mutt. And, now over the years (with linux very much my daily driver for years now), I find myself leveraging the terminal much much more - e.g. reading RSS feed via newsboat, etc....sort of a return to the basics, but basics that enable me to be far more productive. But one of the areas where i still can't seem to be comfortable in the terminal anymore is email. I think its because of attachments that i constantly need send and receive, and maybe the workflow for that is not ideal *for me* - i don't know. Or, maybe I've gotten so used to Thunderbird, that my brain seems happy there, where it has been happy in the terminak for other areas - who knows. In any case, i welcome more terminal apps! Yes, keep on improving mutt for others, but maybe this new one might work for me (and others who haven't clicked with mutt and its ilk). Kudos and good luck to the makers of Meli! (Who knows, maybe i'll give it a spin)

Re: Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt

#4

With (al)pine in contrast to mutt you at least have filtering rules to move a mail to a folder. I hope that this would be added to meli, too - that's the last thing I would consider missing when reading the docs on the website: https://meli.delivery/

Why not use procmail for it?

Re: Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt

#5
post #3

My very first email account (when starting university in the early 90s) was via Pine on a unix machine; and i loved it! Sure, the excitement of "a new tech thing" was there, but also the fast, productive simplicity of it all: i can send a message to someone anywhere in the world quite easily! Years later when i started getting into linux as my personal machine/daily driver, i tried using mutt. Mutt didn't stick for m…

I was thinking was using pine in a unix shell account at university in 2002 and I have the fondest memories! That was an awesome client

Re: Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt

#7
post #3

My very first email account (when starting university in the early 90s) was via Pine on a unix machine; and i loved it! Sure, the excitement of "a new tech thing" was there, but also the fast, productive simplicity of it all: i can send a message to someone anywhere in the world quite easily! Years later when i started getting into linux as my personal machine/daily driver, i tried using mutt. Mutt didn't stick for m…

People still use (al)pine at the University of Washington, where is was created! They even have stats on it going back a long time: https://staff.washington.edu/corey/pine-stats/

Re: Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt

#8
Love the recent efforts on building new terminal clients. I'm excited to try meli out. I've been using https://aerc-mail.org/ as a daily driver for several months, but excited to try some others in this space. I found mutt a bit intimidating to configure, where aerc and meli seem more straightforward.

Re: Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt

#9
post #6

The problem is the HTML Emails I annoyingly get sent by non-tech people.

With mutt, you can tell it to pass HTML through an external program (like a text mode browser) to render to plain text. Not immediately obvious if meli supports that, but it is at least tractable.

Re: Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt

#10
post #6

The problem is the HTML Emails I annoyingly get sent by non-tech people.

I use aerc, which is similar to this, but written in Go. Most of these TUI mail clients have a configurable filter option for different MIME types. I've found that this program does a great job as an HTML to text filter:

https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text

I think the classic approach is to use something like lynx or w3m with networking disabled, but I wasn't impressed with the output.

Post reply on HN