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

git.meli.delivery

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

#61

Post by jrm4 »

bennyp101 wrote: post #40

I gotta ask, how do people use this in the real world? How do attachments and images work? Does it work with O365? Can I sync my calendars? Why not just use thunderbird or something? Genuinely curious

Neomutt user here.

Attachments are downloaded with a few keystrokes, I also have a command to "open in browser" if I really really need to see the images which is rare.

I do use mine with Outlook Mail, but it just does mail. I'll bet there's probably a calendar sync thing.

And the why is speed, overwhelmingly. I don't delete any email and I don't have to use spam filters because it's THAT FAST. I can "move" literally as quickly as it takes to identify the message and decide what to do with it (read, not-read and skip, respond etc)

I just archive EVERYTHING that's read, and make a separate note in my todos if there's something I need to act on that isn't a reply. Replying to humans is very quick too, which is really the only thing I need from email.

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

#62

Post by stevekemp »

zbuf wrote: post #42

I get excited when I hear of something like this, but then it often turns to indifference when "terminal" UI is shoe-horning GUI elements into large grids of UTF8. There's a time and place for GUI if that is the motivation, and for anything short of that my Pine/Alpine familiarity is going to be hard to beat. But what would be interesting is "command-line" for a modern email client. Similar in spirit to the old mh, p…

Back in the day I wrote my own console based mail-client, scriptable with lua. It worked really well for my needs.

I did dabble afterwards with some simple utilities for scripting mail, showing a list of folders, showing a list of messages in a folder, or viewing a single mail.

After spending so long working on my own client I could never be enthusiastic enough to really take it much further, but for reference the tools still work, against a local Maildir hierarchy:

https://github.com/skx/maildir-tools

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

#63

Post by rsync »

buildbot wrote: post #7
mxuribe wrote: 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/

Every email ever sent from anyone working at rsync.net is sent with (al)pine.

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

#64

Post by seszett »

Jorengarenar wrote: post #57
seszett wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you doing with your old emails? Do you delete them? Or have you found a method to archive them that produces few folders with few emails in each and that works consistently over the decades? Because I haven't, and having everything in one folder works just fine with the clients I use.

I delete e-mails the moment I don't need them anymore. Right now, on my main mail, I have ~400 mails in Trash, but only 10 in Inbox and Archive + another dozen in Sent.

I sometimes wish to find emails that I couldn't have known I would need again.

Right now, I've been looking for the email address of the landlord of the house I lived in until 2009. I'm happy that I didn't remove his email saying that his son would come on Friday to fix the door handle.

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

#65

Post by mxuribe »

buildbot wrote: post #7
mxuribe wrote: 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/

Unbelievable that its still in use! But i guess if something works, why stop, right? Thanks for dsharing the stats!

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

#66

Post by epilys »

bennyp101 wrote: post #40

I gotta ask, how do people use this in the real world? How do attachments and images work? Does it work with O365? Can I sync my calendars? Why not just use thunderbird or something? Genuinely curious

Attachments: you can open them with any command or save them as a file. For example on linux, you can open a file with `xdg-open` and it will try to select the default app from the mime type.

Images: you can select to view HTML emails on the browser (default is plain text generated by w3m) but it should be possible to use some other script instead of w3m that shows images in your terminal.

No calendar support, it's just email (well, and NNTP)

WHy not use thunderbird? Hm it's personal taste. Since I'm on the terminal most of the time, I find it more convenient. But obviously Thunderbird is the best GUI client since it's most mature, stable and it's open source.

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

#67

Post by epilys »

aduitsis wrote: post #28
simmons wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the grandparent poster, but I'm not sure if this is what they had in mind by "filtering rules". When I read the comment, I immediately thought of how I use procmail for live sorting of incoming mail, but I also occasionally pull out al(pine) for various manual sorting/rearranging tasks. I've always found its "broaden/narrow selection + zoom" tools to be pretty powerful. (Maybe mutt has tools of similar capabi…

Not exactly the same, but in mutt, there is a simple language which you can use to refer to a subset of the messages in your view. E.g. "~U" will match you unread messages, etc. You can group tag messages on mutt with any pattern you'd like and then move them. Or, you can limit your view to what you want to move, select some and then move them.

There's functionality for that in meli (`select ` command) which then can be used with `moveto` command or `delete` etc...

(Γεια σου Θανάση! μάνος από εμπ και meli dev)

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

#69

Post by epilys »

Emigre_ wrote: post #41

I’d like a terminal email client inspired by vim’s usual keys and behaviour. I didn’t particularly like mutt’s default keys.

meli has somewhat vim-like default key bindings. But every shortcut can be re-defined to your own preference. Check out meli.conf(5) manual page!

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

#70

Post by epilys »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #9
kleiba wrote: 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.

meli does pass html messages to w3m by default, but you can change it to anything else with the `html_filter` setting.
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