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Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

blog.sergeantbiggs.net

81–90 of 166 posts

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#81
There's one big drawback I discovered the hard way, to not storing emails locally.

If you have to leave an org for any reason, you lose access to the entire email history with that org. Some of which might still be important to you for a multitude of very legitimate reasons (such as contacts).

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#82
post #66

Aerc has been my daily driver for a long, long time. I use it with IMAP (GMail and other reasons) but its completely usable with local mail directories. - I have redefined the Aerc key mapping with a set of Vim-like keybindings, since I am too old to learn new keybindings. And I bet now I as fast as possible slashing through countless mails… - I configured Aerc to work properly with Gmail and Imapfilter. - I created…

I'm interested in the Gmail integration. Tried it with mutt and decided I didn't want to spend an afternoon figuring it out.

'Sides, I hear that Gmail is phasing out IMAP. :-?

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#83
post #72
post #6

aerc is really weird in the sense of being designed as a client, not storing the mails on your computer. Which has some performance implications and limitations. Though you can have local mail too, really felt like a second-class feature when I looked. But to be fair it has been a long time since I looked at it. Given the above I'm really surprised that IMAP doesn't work better than it does. Often gets disconnected a…

> aerc is really weird in the sense of being designed as a client, not storing the mails on your computer. Isn't that true for mutt as well?

[deleted]

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#84
post #72
post #6

aerc is really weird in the sense of being designed as a client, not storing the mails on your computer. Which has some performance implications and limitations. Though you can have local mail too, really felt like a second-class feature when I looked. But to be fair it has been a long time since I looked at it. Given the above I'm really surprised that IMAP doesn't work better than it does. Often gets disconnected a…

> aerc is really weird in the sense of being designed as a client, not storing the mails on your computer. Isn't that true for mutt as well?

If anything, I feel it's the other way around for Mutt. I've been using Mutt for at least 10 years using local mail storage almost exclusively that entire time, and I've never found it to be cumbersome. I tried IMAP at one point, and I was not a fan.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#85
post #77

I frequently have to send e-mails from different addresses, so it seems I need to have manage multiple .conf files for this to work correctly? Example: - login user: example@example.com - alises: *@example.com, postmaster@example.com, abuse@example.com ... Mail addressed to "ex@example.com" is delivered to "example@example.com" inbox. But instead of replying from "example@example.com", I would prefer to reply via "ex…

Aerc lets you do this, although it doesn't automatically fill it in based on the recipient in a reply. So you have to remember to adjust the sender for each email that you send.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#86
post #3

I miss using a TUI for mail but it looks like they haven’t really solved the most important reason I don’t, which is rendering HTML emails.

Emacs (even on the TTY), can do a decent job of rendering markup using it's built in EWW browser. Works pretty well, at least for most of the content I'm looking for. Using it with Notmuch or mu4e is not the easiest thing to do, but it works pretty solidly.

I genuinely wish I liked using emacs.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#87
post #76
post #55

The issues we humans have with emails in the present time lay in the lack of modern PERSONAL email tools development. For modern and personal I mean NOT living on someone else mailserver but easily download or sync remote IMAPs, or to use them directly (with some issues [1]) or via a personal homeserver IMAP, with a modern search-based client like notmuch-emacs/mu4e, and a built-in decent filtering tool (like MailDro…

> modern PERSONAL email tools The capitalized personal part there is so important! So few people today even realize what is possible, since they are captive in websites like gmail that have so very little functionality. email was always supposed to have a 100% customizable workflow, filtering, sorting, foldering, etc. We still have this of course, as all the old tools work. But there needs to be more awareness how gr…

I still use fetchmail, while I prefer MailDrop over procmail :-)

And, yes, I 110% agree about automation revolving around emails, or simply revolving around exchanging text between people asynchronously. I still have my ascii ribbon campaign in the signature [well, mostly because I very lazy].

One of the first kind of automation, it's just mere handling, I have auto-delete for some mails not flagged, to keep my maildirs of a human size, and having them on my iron I can choose both the size and how much allow to grow without having to pay extra subscription or experimenting many third party "old mails missing" issues. But also small potatoes automation from "the smart home", bills annotations and so on. If a sufficient mass of people know how much and how simply we can do certain things like extracting attachments (uudeview, ripmime etc) and archiving them we can easily imaging e-bills (now that most western countries have them, for those who do not know e-invoices, typically XML-based with signatures or not, sometimes pdfs with embedded XML/JSON) attached and automatically archived by our desktop for future access in a snap.

Similar things about other "old tools" from usenet to RSS, just imaging your bank offering an authenticated feed of every transaction, markets changes etc with push notifications as well.

With these tools the modern world could be automated 10x the actual level with 1/10 of the actual effort needed for just the actual level. Unfortunately those who know today are less and less and very unfortunately those teaching in academia seems to have lost any interest in teaching, maybe with some incentives by big tech...

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#89

This is the first I've read of "TUI" standing for what I have to assume is "terminal user interface"? I'd call them CLI (command line interface). When did this TUI acronym start? What does it mean? Everyone else seems to know it and use it without defining.

I dont know when it exactly started but I've heard and use this term at least 15 years. CLI != TUI. TUI is more like a "standard" window (GUI) but all text based.

I've also never heard this term. Back when text interfaces for mail were the default, but they started getting "fancy" like elm, pine and mutt in the 90s, they were always called curses or ncurses interfaces. When GUIs became a thing, the older things became called text-mode, but I've never encountered TUI before.

The only TUI that I'd heard of is the travel company.

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