This is exactly the sort of article I want to see on HN. It's thorough, and instead of dropping a pile of dotfiles on github and saying "here you go", Steve goes through everything and explains what's what and why.
The Homely Mutt
81–90 of 116 posts
Re: The Homely Mutt
#82Re: The Homely Mutt
#83The day I need to make this sort of power-over-interface trade-off for reading email is the day I stop using email.
Re: The Homely Mutt
#84I 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…
If you don't like offlineimap, why not run a true imap server instead? At home I have set up Dovecot + Postfix. I pull in all my remote mail through fetchmail and dump it into my own imap server. Works like a charm and it's not hard to set up.
I use Thunderbird + Muttator for reading from my laptop and mutt through SSH when reading from e.g. work. I can even read it from my Android phone and tablet.
Re: The Homely Mutt
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I launch innumerable copies of mutt without -R, and have never had any conflicts.
Like the original poster, I'm using offlineimap and maildir's entirely.
What kind of conflicts do you get?
Re: The Homely Mutt
#86I 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…
Try isync. I had some crashes with 1.0.4 but 1.0.5 has been working well: http://isync.sourceforge.net/
Re: The Homely Mutt
#87It would be great if someone could write good text email client. I recently tried some old ones I used in the 90s again, and the quality of software has improved a lot since then.
Mutt:
- gets SSL errors with MS Exchange (gnu bug?), doesn't retry the connection and then stops displaying all your email.
- could never get html to text rendering working, almost all emails blank
- gave up on mutt...
Alpine:
- did actually covert html emails to text fine, most emails are readable
- no key rebindins (sic), I have ^T bound to new-window in tmux, too bad that's the only way to run spell check in alpine is to press ^T
- lose connection to IMAP server causes already downloaded mail to no longer be displayed on the screen
- quirky LDAP lookups, I can't type peoples full names, only their login names, then it resolves them fine
- tried to put my IMAP folder first on the list in the config file to make it faster to get to my inbox, crash
- tried to have it startup in my inbox using the startup key sequence, crash
- if there's one letter in my drafts folder, it asks me every time if I wan't to continue it when I compose a new message
- asks me every time if I want to reply to everyone, and if I say yes, it includes me(!?) so I get a dup email
- has pine's legendary inconstant key bindings (or is that a feature?)
- sending a message hangs the whole client until it's been sent
- no real concept of a deleted folder, just puts a D next to it and leaves it displayed on your screen, so you have to expunge manually if you don't want it to clutter your screen
- all in all, alpine is usable though, but there's plenty annoying things in it we used to think were normal back when pine was popular.
Re: The Homely Mutt
#88It would be great if someone could write good text email client. I recently tried some old ones I used in the 90s again, and the quality of software has improved a lot since then. Mutt: - gets SSL errors with MS Exchange (gnu bug?), doesn't retry the connection and then stops displaying all your email. - could never get html to text rendering working, almost all emails blank - gave up on mutt... Alpine: - did actuall…
I have been using Alpine/Pine for almost 13 years, and agree with most of your concerns. However, some of these can be controlled using the settings.
- Full name search in LDAP work correctly. Have you set name, surname, and given name attributes correctly in your LDAP setup.
- I exclusively used IMAP and have had no troubles with IMAP folder being fist in the list.
- Starting in the inbox (using key sequences) has always worked for me.
- Reply all does not include me in the Cc. Have you tried setting up alternate addresses field in the settings.
For HTML emails, I have set w3m as my html viewer. w3m works better with complex layouts in html.
Re: The Homely Mutt
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's an unexamined assumption underlying your comments: Namely that because something is terminal-based, it's 'not modern', and that the GUI unambiguously represents progress on all fronts for all uses. But consider: in the 30 odd years of GUI prevalence, there has never been an example of a GUI email client as simple (for some value of simple), functional, and powerful-for-power-users, as Mutt and Pine. I think i…
>But consider: in the 30 odd years of GUI prevalence, there has never been an example of a GUI email client as simple (for some value of simple), functional, and powerful-for-power-users, as Mutt and Pine. That's exactly my point though - why do most email clients suck so bad? Slow and bloated are the most common adjectives thrown around (Outlook, Thunderbird), and if not that, then there's the weird UI's (Eudora, Th…
I use alpine and have set w3m as the HTML reader in my mailcap file. w3m also displays images in HTML. Alpine is able to display most HTML emails just fine, but when it fails, I simply press V (which shows different mime parts of the message) and Enter (by default the focus is on the 2nd part, which is text/html; Enter launches the default html browser, which is w3m that displays the message). This gives all the benefits of alpine, with the option to display html+images in the same terminal if I need to.
Re: The Homely Mutt
#90It would be great if someone could write good text email client. I recently tried some old ones I used in the 90s again, and the quality of software has improved a lot since then. Mutt: - gets SSL errors with MS Exchange (gnu bug?), doesn't retry the connection and then stops displaying all your email. - could never get html to text rendering working, almost all emails blank - gave up on mutt... Alpine: - did actuall…
I have been using Alpine/Pine for almost 13 years, and agree with most of your concerns. However, some of these can be controlled using the settings. - Full name search in LDAP work correctly. Have you set name, surname, and given name attributes correctly in your LDAP setup. - I exclusively used IMAP and have had no troubles with IMAP folder being fist in the list. - Starting in the inbox (using key sequences) has a…
- LDAP: it's a corp AD server, cn, name and sn are all set correctly from what I can tell.
- Maybe CentOS 6.3 ships with a bad build or lib that causes it to crash. I'm using alpine-2.02-3.el6.x86_64.
- Setting the alternate address fixed the replying to myself issue, thanks!
- I'll give w2m a shot too. ;-)
EDIT: I suspect the crashes when going into the mailbox are due to it requiring me to enter a password.