"...it’s got a lot of advantages over many other email clients."
The advantages were never enumerated. Most of the article was spent teaching you how to program ^H^H^H configure the thing.
What are the advantages?
The Homely Mutt
41–50 of 116 posts
Re: The Homely Mutt
#42This is a great post about a very finely tuned Mutt setup. I always enjoy reading about high customized environments. I am someone who would love to use Mutt but I get so much HTML only email it's sadly impossible for me to do so. (Newsletters and misc friends who think large HTML footers are cool.)
In your .muttrc:
auto_view text/html alternative_order text/plain text text/html
That presents plain text first if it's multiply-encoded, but makes html available. In your mailcap:
text/html; /path/to/browser '%s'; description=HTML Text; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; nametemplate=%s.html
displays HTML in a browser window for you. mutt launches this when you choose to look at the html version.
But instead, your mailcap could have this:
text/html; lynx -dump %s; copiousoutput; nametemplate=%s.html
which mutt interprets as "filter this through lynx and display it in the terminal" which will solve 98% of your issues. It's fast, too.
Re: The Homely Mutt
#43I doubt I have the need to customize GMail to justify doing this amount of work...but this was a very well put-together guide that goes beyond just "how-to-replace-Sparrow" to showing the underpinnings of how e-mail works and the thought process behind a hacked-together interface and service. I'm bookmarking this as an example of a thoroughly useful and informative guide. Thanks for making this.
Yes, very well written.
I do prefer offline e-mail and I actually use Claws under Linux, an X11 port is available for Mac OS
Seems to provide similar functionality.
Re: The Homely Mutt
#44I switched back to Mutt a few months ago after trying Mail.app (filtering wasn't up to my requirements, would hang often) and Thunderbird (bloated and slow under load). It's been a champion.
urlview.sh is pretty awful, mis-parsing urls constantly for me. I then discovered extract_url.pl[1], which is much, much better.
offlineimap likes to hang randomly - mail just stops coming in and the process never stops, requiring me to remove the lockfile by hand, then kill the process. I haven't found a replacement for it, unfortunately. Definitely open to suggestions on this front.
The linked view_attachment.sh file has problems, for example, with files with multiple dots in the filename (among others). I have made a few tweaks[2] to it to make it more robust. It still has a few issues, but I've found it to work better for the most part.
msmtp is probably unnecessary nowadays if you have a typical setup. For GMail, add the lines:
set smtp_url = smtp://your@email.com@smtp.gmail.com:587/
set smtp_pass = mah_password
I also wrote a very small, crappy applescript launcher to launch an iTerm with mutt from the OSX dock[3]. It won't open a second copy if already running, but I haven't been able to figure out how to display a badge on the dock to denote unread mail. It may not be possible.
[1] http://www.memoryhole.net/~kyle/extract_url/
[2] https://github.com/xxx/dotfiles/blob/master/osx/mailcap/view...
[3] https://github.com/xxx/dotfiles/blob/master/osx/mutt/mutt-it...
Re: The Homely Mutt
#45"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…
Am I supposed to eschew powerful tools because there wasn't a UX guy involved in the project?
If I cared that much about ease of configuration, I'd use Textmate instead of Vim, and Colloquy instead of irssi.
Re: The Homely Mutt
#46I do almost exactly the same thing except I use getmail as my MRU and I have it checking many different email accounts (gmail, work mail, other work mail, etc). mutt is the best email client I've ever used. I like taking control of my email, using my own paid-for smtp service (tuffmail) and in general not relying on hosted email providers. procmail or maildrop are very handy too.
Re: The Homely Mutt
#47My dotfiles are online if anyone wants to take a look at the actual configuration I use: https://bitbucket.org/sjl/dotfiles/ https://github.com/sjl/dotfiles
Great writeup. Have you checked out mutt-kz[1]? It is a mutt fork with fairly seamless notmuch integration.
Re: The Homely Mutt
#48I switched back to Mutt a few months ago after trying Mail.app (filtering wasn't up to my requirements, would hang often) and Thunderbird (bloated and slow under load). It's been a champion. urlview.sh is pretty awful, mis-parsing urls constantly for me. I then discovered extract_url.pl[1], which is much, much better. offlineimap likes to hang randomly - mail just stops coming in and the process never stops, requirin…
I had the same problems with Offlineimap while running it as a long-lived background process, and wasn't able to find any clean way to resolve them.
Nowadays I have a cron script that kills any existing Offlineimap processes, and allows a new one to run through once. Works perfectly.
Re: The Homely Mutt
#49There's one and only one reason that I haven't ever switched to a terminal based email client.. HTML messages. I want to see images and formatted text, not an unholy mess of tags and other detritus the program can't render.
As much as I like Alpine, being stuck on the terminal is a total deal breaker. It's 2012 ferchrissakes - why are we using email tech that's stuck in the 80s? Why does "modern" have to be at constant odds with "simple and functional"?
Re: The Homely Mutt
#50[deleted]