Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can just set up Mutt to open HTML mail in Firefox.
On top of that, you can use Browsh [1] to browse from CLI. [1] https://www.brow.sh/
Bloat.
Mutt email client 25 years old
151–160 of 161 posts
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just used the word “simply” in the same was as you used the word “just”. The argument GP was making is that what is obvious to one reader may not be obvious to another. So using the words “simply” or “just” or “obviously” does not add information, except to signal that you feel the reader is ignorant if they are not aware of what you’re explaining. My PhD advisor always crossed these words out of my scientific wr…
Strangely, that's entirely the opposite of what I understood from the original comment. To me, "you can just use XXX" sounds like someone just told me that "all you need is XXX; don't worry it's simple". The assumption is that the HN'er saying it and the HN'er being said to share an implicit level of expertise since we are all talking about mutt here.
That's exactly how I meant it, FWIW.
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#153Thank you Mutt (and also NeoMutt for pushing the envelope), you have been my e-mail client now for the last four years and as an academic that spends a significant amount of time reading and responding to e-mail it is (somehow?) the best option out there. Setup: * Mutt (I had slowdowns with NeoMutt) * Vim with four e-mail specific lines in the `vimrc` * fdm for retrieval and delivery rules * Syncthing for synchronisa…
Do you mind sharing how to use notmuch from mutt? Does mutt support virtual folders like neomutt?
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#154Earlier 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.
One of my main reasons for using Mutt is precisely the opposite: with mbsync I have copies of all emails on my laptop, so I can read, search, and compose emails when I don't have an internet connection.
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
A great example of the HN use of the word "just".
The real problem though is not preserving the rich-text-ness of the quoted message when replying, and the inability to have inline images. I use Outlook at work and mutt for private email. Using mutt at work just wouldn’t be practical, as the text markup and inline images are often critical to the exchange. On a related note, while I love the UX of mutt, I do find proportional fonts to be significantly more readable…
I avoid that by replying inline, discarding the history of multiple-quoted emails from top-repliers. Everybody else uses Outlook, but nobody has yet complained.
For sending emails with formatting (italics, headings), I use Markdown in Vim then press H in Mutt before sending, which pipes it through an appropriate filter:
set send_multipart_alternative_filter=html_alternative send-hook . 'set send_multipart_alternative=no' macro compose H ':set send_multipart_alternative=yes' 'add HTML alternative'
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use Mutt too. Although nobody has commented on my mails, I know some people read them on mobile, and because plain text is formatted for an 80-column terminal, it doesn't reflow nicely on their mobile devices so they have to scroll side-to-side to read my message. I think people don't know that's because I use Mutt, but a hard-to-read mail is not an impression I want to convey sometimes. Also, sometimes my mails re…
It's entirely possible to send mail as format=flowed plain text, so that messages will rewrap nicely on any screen. I do it all the time with Mutt, it's actually very easy.
I know about format=flowed. But does that actually solve the problem?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20514314
> The suggestion to use `format=flowed` doesn’t help, as the standard is ill-supported: https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/17/format-flowed/ I’ve researched the issue far and wide and the only way to have responsive, nicely wrapped emails is using HTML.
https://cpbotha.net/2016/09/27/thunderbird-support-of-rfc-36...
> Update on 2019-07-16 The current GMail web-ui ignores format=flowed and renders such emails with hard linebreaks everywhere. Thank you Google for violating yet more email standards.
Most people I correspond with where I care about my mail looking "normal" to them seem to use Gmail (about 30-50%), then Apple Mail, Outlook or Thunderbird.
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's entirely possible to send mail as format=flowed plain text, so that messages will rewrap nicely on any screen. I do it all the time with Mutt, it's actually very easy.
I know about format=flowed. But does that actually solve the problem? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20514314 > The suggestion to use `format=flowed` doesn’t help, as the standard is ill-supported: https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/17/format-flowed/ I’ve researched the issue far and wide and the only way to have responsive, nicely wrapped emails is using HTML. https://cpbotha.net/2016/09/27/thunderbird-support-of-r…
format=flowed does not solve the problem, but you don’t have to resort to HTML. This guy¹ has the right idea: just make each paragraph in your email a single long line (but no more than 998 characters). The idea that we need to break lines at 78 characters, or whatever, is false. Long lines will be wrapped responsively in any sane client, so the reader will have a good experience.
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#158Thank you Mutt (and also NeoMutt for pushing the envelope), you have been my e-mail client now for the last four years and as an academic that spends a significant amount of time reading and responding to e-mail it is (somehow?) the best option out there. Setup: * Mutt (I had slowdowns with NeoMutt) * Vim with four e-mail specific lines in the `vimrc` * fdm for retrieval and delivery rules * Syncthing for synchronisa…
Do you mind sharing how to use notmuch from mutt? Does mutt support virtual folders like neomutt?
Mutt does not support virtual folders, so there is nothing fancy really about how I use Notmuch as I only use it for search (not tagging). I have a macro to call `mutt-notmuch.py` (there is a Perl version as well) to: search, create a temporary read-only maildir based on the current TTY, and lastly populate in with symlinks to the search results – Mutt then switches into that maildir.
I would love to use Notmuch more, but syncing between devices becomes a pain when everything is no longer a file. There is muchsync [1], but I really do not want to go down the rabbit hole of resolving potential conflicts, etc.
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mind sharing how to use notmuch from mutt? Does mutt support virtual folders like neomutt?
Mutt does not support virtual folders, so there is nothing fancy really about how I use Notmuch as I only use it for search (not tagging). I have a macro to call `mutt-notmuch.py` (there is a Perl version as well) to: search, create a temporary read-only maildir based on the current TTY, and lastly populate in with symlinks to the search results – Mutt then switches into that maildir. I would love to use Notmuch more…
Thanks for sharing your experience.
I'm subscribed to several mailing lists/forums and sometimes get a 3-figure number of emails per day. Since I can't (nor want to) read all of them, I score them based on the subject field (~s). Unfortunately, the scoring algorithm can't take the body into account (~b). That's why I considered notmuch for creating (virtual) mailboxes with context I'm interested in...
Re: Mutt email client 25 years old
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know about format=flowed. But does that actually solve the problem? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20514314 > The suggestion to use `format=flowed` doesn’t help, as the standard is ill-supported: https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/17/format-flowed/ I’ve researched the issue far and wide and the only way to have responsive, nicely wrapped emails is using HTML. https://cpbotha.net/2016/09/27/thunderbird-support-of-r…
format=flowed does not solve the problem, but you don’t have to resort to HTML. This guy¹ has the right idea: just make each paragraph in your email a single long line (but no more than 998 characters). The idea that we need to break lines at 78 characters, or whatever, is false. Long lines will be wrapped responsively in any sane client, so the reader will have a good experience. [1] https://www.arp242.net/email-wra…
One of the complaints I've had is that my mail had to be horizontally scrolled to be read.
One long line sounds likely to make the problem for that person worse not better!
That was a while ago though. Clients may have changed.
I'd love to know if someone has put the time into cross-platform tests for this sort of thing.
The only thing I'm completely confident of at the moment is that multipart/mixed text+HTML works for every client.