Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Homely Mutt

stevelosh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 116 posts

Re: The Homely Mutt

#31

Post by q_revert »

sigil wrote: post #3
BCM43 wrote: post #2

I would also recommend people look into notmuch. http://notmuchmail.org/

Tried notmuch a while back, ended up going back to mutt. If you're an emacs user the notmuch mode may work well for you. The notmuch.vim plugin, OTOH, leaves a lot to be desired. More promising is this fork of mutt that adds notmuch support: https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz

"Notmuch is not much of an email program. It doesn't receive messages (no POP or IMAP support). It doesn't send messages (no mail composer, no network code at all)."

notmuch doesn't replace mutt, you use it with mutt/offlineimap etc as your mail indexer, which makes massive mail archives instantly searchable.. (and does this extremely well)

I suspect this what the grandparent was referring to, it's not intended as a mutt replacement, so to complain that it doesn't replace it well is a bit unfair

Re: The Homely Mutt

#32

Post by rbellio »

"Mutt certainly isn’t the prettiest email client around, and its setup/configuration process is one of the ugliest out there. But once you get it set up it’s got a lot of advantages over many other email clients."

Stopped reading, right there. Why are we still fighting with things that are difficult/ugly to setup/configure? Could have been the best tool ever written, but if I have to spend a half a day figuring it out, and there are other tools that do it better, I'm out.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#33

Post by stevelosh »

pwthornton wrote: post #30

Sparrow is still getting small updates on both iOS and OS X. Mutt hasn't been updated in a few years. I'm not sure one is more dead than the other. Also, one app became loved because it has a really innovative UI and the other is an app that eschews a modern UI. I'm not sure many people will logically make the leap from Sparrow to Mutt. More likely, people will gravitate back to to gmail.com, which should be getting…

> Mutt hasn't been updated in a few years

http://dev.mutt.org/hg/mutt/ says two months.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#34

Post by 3amOpsGuy »

rbellio wrote: post #32

"Mutt certainly isn’t the prettiest email client around, and its setup/configuration process is one of the ugliest out there. But once you get it set up it’s got a lot of advantages over many other email clients." Stopped reading, right there. Why are we still fighting with things that are difficult/ugly to setup/configure? Could have been the best tool ever written, but if I have to spend a half a day figuring it ou…

Valid point and I fall into this camp for all sorts of key software (e.g. you'd never catch me spending more than 5 mins tweaking a new web browser).

For other software, e.g. my editor, my mail client - software i'm producing content in, rather than consuming, i'll happily put in a few hours up front to get comfortable on the grounds that i will reap a greater reward in time saved medium term.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#35

Post by ChrisFrost »

nvarsj wrote: post #23
Dejital wrote: post #20

I have spent hours and hours configuring my `mutt`, `offlineimap`, `putmail.py`, but I have since grown disenchanted. In my experience, `offlineimap` is annoyingly prone to crashing without any indication. Thus, checking mail within `mutt` becomes unreliable. However, my favorite aspect of `mutt` has been and remains being able to send e-mails very quickly and easily through Terminal. echo "Hello World!" | mutt -s "T…

Worse than that, offlineimap can be plain destructive in the right circumstances. I've had it arbitrarily delete thousands of messages due to the local cache being in a strange state.

You might try a similar program, mbsync (http://isync.sourceforge.net/). It's worked well for me during the past half-dozen years.

mbsync does not watch or poll for changes, but you can run mbsync in a loop from your shell. Or, if you are running Linux on the mail server and client and use Maildirs, you can run mbsync from mswatch (http://mswatch.sourceforge.net/). (Disclaimer: I'm the author of mswatch.)

Re: The Homely Mutt

#36

Post by ajross »

rbellio wrote: post #32

"Mutt certainly isn’t the prettiest email client around, and its setup/configuration process is one of the ugliest out there. But once you get it set up it’s got a lot of advantages over many other email clients." Stopped reading, right there. Why are we still fighting with things that are difficult/ugly to setup/configure? Could have been the best tool ever written, but if I have to spend a half a day figuring it ou…

"We" (meaning not you, apparently) are still doing that kind of thing because we know we'll spend thousands of days using the tool, so a few hours spend leaning it seems like a bargain. I could just as easily ask why "we" (meaning you) are still getting confused between "discoverability" and "usability" after decades of silly arguments like this.

Don't use mutt, that's fine. But come up with some better justifications. (edit for full disclosure: I don't use mutt either, having to deal professionally with enough unreadable-in-plain-text mail that it makes more sense for me to do everything in Thunderbird.)

Re: The Homely Mutt

#37

Post by tambourine_man »

pwthornton wrote: post #30

Sparrow is still getting small updates on both iOS and OS X. Mutt hasn't been updated in a few years. I'm not sure one is more dead than the other. Also, one app became loved because it has a really innovative UI and the other is an app that eschews a modern UI. I'm not sure many people will logically make the leap from Sparrow to Mutt. More likely, people will gravitate back to to gmail.com, which should be getting…

I'm not sure one is more dead than the other.

Mutt is Open Source.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#38

Post by misiti3780 »

rbellio wrote: post #32

"Mutt certainly isn’t the prettiest email client around, and its setup/configuration process is one of the ugliest out there. But once you get it set up it’s got a lot of advantages over many other email clients." Stopped reading, right there. Why are we still fighting with things that are difficult/ugly to setup/configure? Could have been the best tool ever written, but if I have to spend a half a day figuring it ou…

i agree, that seems like a huge pain in the ass to configure when sparrow is working fine for me.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#39

Post by tmhedberg »

kapowaz wrote: post #27

> Now that Sparrow is effectively dead Sparrow 1.6.4 was released on September 11, 2012. Mutt 1.5.21 was released on September 15, 2010. You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

As when Knuth stopped releasing new versions of TeX because it reached a point where it was "done", software that has been around for long enough can eventually mature to the point where there's nothing left to add without expanding the scope of the project beyond its original definition.

Mutt may simply be at that point. I use Mutt as my primary MUA in a very similar manner to the author of the article, and I can't really say that there are any features that I want that it lacks. Of course, I can't speak for everyone on that point; for instance, some people actually want to send and receive HTML email, and Mutt can't easily deal with that. But for some of us, lack of HTML support is itself a feature, and when you really have to, piping a text/html MIME part to a browser for rendering is really easy to accomplish.

I know essentially nothing about Sparrow, but I suspect that it is a much newer product than Mutt, has had far less time to mature, and as such simply requires a more frequent release schedule than a project with Mutt's long history.

Basically, a comparison between most recent release dates doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#40

Post by dmortin »

nicksergeant wrote: post #29
ket wrote: post #24

What are the advantages of using gmail as your server rather than, say, installing your own postfix server on some linode?

Gmail has largely solved the spam problem. Configuring spam filters and the like is still a PITA with your own server.

Yep, collabrorative filtering works very well. It's very rare I have spam in my Gmail inbox.
Post reply on HN