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The Homely Mutt

stevelosh.com

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Re: The Homely Mutt

#71

Post by rbellio »

tobiasu wrote: post #70
rbellio wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my fault for not explaining why I wasn't going to look into it more. According to the features it has listed, it offers me no obvious advantages to my current tools and claims to be difficult to setup and configure. Beyond that, if you truly want adoption for a tool, you'd invest time into making sure that you remove the obstacles of someone utilizing it. This is a tool that hasn't had any major releases sinc…

Can you imagine that software that is around since 1995 is sort of done by now?

If a piece of software has been around since 1995 and the UX is poor, I would consider it far from done.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#72

Post by modarts »

sliverstorm wrote: post #59
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…

Something difficult to set up and/or configure can still be worth the suffering. Sure, it'd be great if it was easy to configure to boot, but sometimes pain now can reap greater payback down the line...

This may be stretching the applicable domain a bit, but I think the concept of YAGNI applies to the time/effort spent on configuring primitive tools to suit use cases that -may- present themselves in the future.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#73

Post by overshard »

dsr_ wrote: post #42
overshard wrote: post #22

This 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 cou…

I'll give lynx a try with this, I can't use a full browser as it would be on a remote computer setup. Thanks for the tip!

Re: The Homely Mutt

#74

Post by pnathan »

djcb wrote: post #11

I wrote an emacs-based e-mail client "mu4e"; see e.g. http://emacs-fu.blogspot.fi/2012/08/introducing-mu4e-for-ema... Its user-interface is a bit mutt-influenced, but it's fully query-based and very fast, and of course you can extend it using elisp. A fairly young project, but it's near-fully documented, and the manual has instructions on how to set things up with Gmail.

How does that play out vs. gnus? I have messed around with gnus a bit but don't feel 100% happy with it.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#75

Post by tammer »

Smudge wrote: post #65
lysium wrote: post #60

I love mutt! Unfortunately, I often write emails while looking at another one, which I couldn't make work with mutt. Any ideas?

You could use a terminal multiplexer (tmux, screen, etc) to just split-screen your terminal.

Don't forget to launch any secondary instances of mutt with -R, or you'll encounter conflicts.

I've been searching for the right way to launch the editor in a new tmux pane, although apparently getting that to work smoothly would take a patching effort.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#76

Post by da_n »

Great article and very timely for me, I just got Mutt working this weekend with my Gmail account. Picture of setup (showing Spam folder).

http://i.imgur.com/l4atq.jpg

I haven't added all the features the author pointed out (like server-side search) so excited to make it even better.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#77

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Homely Mutt

#78

Post by dredmorbius »

lysium wrote: post #60

I love mutt! Unfortunately, I often write emails while looking at another one, which I couldn't make work with mutt. Any ideas?

You can launch a compose session from any terminal. "mutt -s 'subject line'" will prompt for recipient(s) and drop you into an editor for composing.

You can even pipe output straight to mutt:

    df ¦ mutt -s "disk utilization" foo@example.com

Re: The Homely Mutt

#80

Post by chimeracoder »

sophacles wrote: post #62
stevelosh wrote: post #10

My 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

Good post, thanks! Do you (or anyone else reading this for that matter) have any insight on how gmail -> imap works with labels when a single message has multiple labels? For example an email may be tagged with "clients" "$JOBNAME" and "receipt". Does it put multiple copies of the message in the local cache, or does it do a hard link, or ...?

Gmail's IMAP is unfortunately broken; they implement labels as folders, not tags. This means that the same message in "All Mail", "Inbox", and "Notifications" are three different messages that happen to have the exact same content and almost identical headers/metadata.

So, by default, you're going to be storing multiple copies of each message. It's not a difficult task to use hardlinks instead if you want, but mutt can't make this judgement by itself, because not all of the metadata is identical, and mutt is designed for the general case, not specifically for Gmail.

Note that this is a Gmail issue, not strictly a mutt issue; other IMAP providers don't all have this awkward behavior.

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