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Mutt email client 25 years old

mutt.org

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Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#101
post #90
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gmail is such a huge regression from mutt (or even pine or elm). I rank the email experience of gmail on par with /bin/mail. It's that useless. I use mutt as an IMAP client for gmail when I can, that works mostly ok. At current $DAYJOB they only allow gmail web client which is a complete disaster of unusability. So I mostly just zoom or slack people since gmail is so useless. gmail is email written by those who have…

As the search experts, I'm always surprised how poor and unreliable search in gmail is. I also use mutt with my gmail account via mbsync. At least you get to use gmail webmail. I have to use Outlook at work.

Lol side-story... I once worked for Big-Multi-National i.t/startup company they even have a stake in Tencent.

Their official mail policy was after 3 months we delete all your email.(You had to save/archive) it yourself if you wanted to have access to it. Some MSExchange setup.

The 'reason' back then was 'Some semi-high-level-executive lost his tablet somewhere with important mail. I couldn't believe a company this big and enough money to buy common sense and intelligence came up with this 3-month rule as a solution to 'lost executive tablet'. They closed allot of their local I.T/Startups in the last decade in South Africa.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#102
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the search experts, I'm always surprised how poor and unreliable search in gmail is. I also use mutt with my gmail account via mbsync. At least you get to use gmail webmail. I have to use Outlook at work.

Lol side-story... I once worked for Big-Multi-National i.t/startup company they even have a stake in Tencent. Their official mail policy was after 3 months we delete all your email.(You had to save/archive) it yourself if you wanted to have access to it. Some MSExchange setup. The 'reason' back then was 'Some semi-high-level-executive lost his tablet somewhere with important mail. I couldn't believe a company this bi…

Jeez, what an awful solution. I work in an academic environment and also in a healthcare environment. There is a national 'secure' MSexchange service for patient data, and we also use a local exchange server for within-hospital communication. I have no idea how secure any/all of this is, but I tried to add my 'national' account onto my regular outlook, and it broke everything. IT support told me that I wasn't allowed to do this because it wouldn't be secure. Which confused me given I used Outlook for confidential communication within the healthcare provider. So I'm forced to use their webmail client which is even worse than Outlook.

Not sure how email got into this mess. It should be simpler, and confidential communication should just use something different IMO.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#103
post #23
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mutt is the best MUA for dealing with large quantities of email. The key to this is the limit/tag workflow. (I wrote it up a few years ago here: https://blog.randomstring.org/2016/09/26/secrets-of-mutt/ ) In brief, you use the limit command to see only the email you are interested in, then use the tag command to do something to those specific messages. Both limit and tag use the same pattern language to specify From,…

I find bower to be better than mutt at dealing with large quantities of email, but mutt is better at everything else. bower can also run locally with a mailbox on a remote, which allows things like easy seamless opening of attachments that don't work as well in a terminal (images, PDFs, &c.).

Mutt works with 250,000 message maildirs. Does bower? Conveniently?

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#104
post #81
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you are implying. That it is hard? It is only a single line added to the `mailcap` file: text/html; firefox '%s' &; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; needsterminal; After that's in place, you simply open attachments (via `view-attachments`) and call `view-attach` (usually via a key binding) on the HTML attachment.

That's fine when you run mutt on your local machine, but the whole reason to use mutt is so that you have a dedicated email machine that you can ssh into and use screen to access email from anywhere. And then things like this become 10x harder (I never found a way, although last I tried was 15+ years ago). Attachments, too.

While requiring X11 forwarding, maybe https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ with a framebuffer would fit the bill?

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#105
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love absolutely Mutt if it weren't for everyone in the world using html email. I know you can view or strip html emails down to their essentials, but it doesn't render properly enough where I can reply to everything at work and not look like a fool because I'm missing some context. Too bad because Mutt is amazing.

You can just set up Mutt to open HTML mail in Firefox.

Or https://www.netsurf-browser.org/, reducing the attack surfer for remote content to compromise you.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#106

Another extremely happy user of the following combination waves hi: • Mutt • OfflineIMAP (to be replaced with `mbsync`; OfflineIMAP is not being ported to Python 3, unfortunately) • Notmuch — for fast indexing, searching, and tagging e-mails • Postfix — Mail Transfer Agent; offline queuing. Overall, it's one of the most robust pieces of software; Postfix never failed even once on me in nearly six years.

I can recommend https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter.

I have it running in a private serving, filtering the emails for me..

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#107
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love absolutely Mutt if it weren't for everyone in the world using html email. I know you can view or strip html emails down to their essentials, but it doesn't render properly enough where I can reply to everything at work and not look like a fool because I'm missing some context. Too bad because Mutt is amazing.

I can't think of a single instance where that happened. Do you have some apps generating broken messages?

I'm amazed that you haven't had that experience yet.

Years ago, when the web was less commonly used, it was pretty much frowned upon to send HTML emails. These days, it's almost the opposite: people asks "what's wrong with you" when you use a text-only email client (setting).

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#108
post #95
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use mutt a lot, and that's what I do when some HTML content is not viewable in the terminal but unless I'm missing something it's one of the areas where HTML-aware clients actually fare better, both in convenience and privacy/security. For instance if I open some marketing email I got in the ProtonMail web client I get a warning that "This message contains remote content" with the option to allow it. Before that my…

That's true, though I avoid this problem by only opening HTML email from known, trusted senders where I consider it acceptable to signal that I opened the email.

Unfortunately even "trusted" senders I know often like to use third-parties to handle tracking and analytics and from there you don't really know where it's going to end up.

Of course you might argue that I shouldn't trust people using these services but then I might as well stop using the internet altogether.

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#109
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love absolutely Mutt if it weren't for everyone in the world using html email. I know you can view or strip html emails down to their essentials, but it doesn't render properly enough where I can reply to everything at work and not look like a fool because I'm missing some context. Too bad because Mutt is amazing.

I render such emails in browser and it is rarely lossy. It is based on munpack and some hacky scripts. Basically construct a html page with all the info and attachments and open it in browser.

Could you share your scripts?

Re: Mutt email client 25 years old

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love absolutely Mutt if it weren't for everyone in the world using html email. I know you can view or strip html emails down to their essentials, but it doesn't render properly enough where I can reply to everything at work and not look like a fool because I'm missing some context. Too bad because Mutt is amazing.

Sometime I wish there was a terminal markup language. So It can do formatting but terminal compatible

I mean... have you heard of ansi escapes and utf8? you can underline, bold, italic, color, and some other stuff with escape codes, and use box drawing characters to make nicer UI like equivalent lines or, well, boxes, there's also hacky ways to use utf8 characters as alternate fonts, such as fraktur characters (you can search up fancy text generators for the hacky character sets)
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