Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everyone has a fancy client-side MUA that gives them trivial access to mbox files. E.g., a typical webmail service will make exporting mboxes into a whole process at best. (And on the sending side, have fun with the lack of git send-email integration. I've spent far more time than I'd like manually patching up References and In-Reply-To headers.) Of course, the classic response is "get a better MUA you luser", bu…
> Of course, the classic response is "get a better MUA you luser" Git is distributed and allows you to work efficiently with poor connectivity, having full history available at any time, which is a big accessibility point for people with limited connectivity (and also helps people working while traveling, for example). If you do have any email client, you get all of this as well, plus arbitrarily powerful, low-latenc…
As it happens, I'm the kind of masochist who uses Sublime Text with no plugins for most of my programming (and literal Notepad for most of my note-taking on Windows), so I find value in letting people stick to their familiar workflow, even if some might see that workflow as somewhere between 'grossly inferior' and 'literally unusable'.
The nice thing with remote Git repos is that you don't need to care at all about how they work internally: you can speak to them using the same Git client (or GUI wrapper, alternative Git-compatible client, etc.) that you use for everything else. Of course, many people would prefer not to use Git at all, but it's a necessary evil to have some client if you want source control, and it doesn't take much work to set up. (At this point, I've installed several source-control tools that I don't really use nor have to worry about.)
But setting up an MUA solely for a git-send-email based workflow is several steps beyond that. E.g., some of the Linux maintainers demand inline patches, which physically cannot be done through many webmail services. So you're left with the slog of finding the right incantations for git-send-email (or an MUA you don't need for anything else) to provide the right credentials to an obscure SMTP proxy. And then you have to worry about how well-protected those credentials are, unless you have some sort of keyring or 2FA integration.
> You probably spend a decent amount of time interacting with email, and the investment in setting up a fast, flexible and powerful environment (preferably reusing your text editor for composing messages) for doing so pays for itself soon.
I'm a bit curious, how well do these tools handle HTML email? Webmail services come with WYSIWYG editors that I make liberal use of for formatted text. There's a big overlap between the "email patches are great!" and "HTML email is the worst!" crowds, but I'd be surprised if HTML email is totally anathema to today's MUAs.