Switching to the Mutt Email Client • Hacker News Board

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#171

Post by phicoh » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 3:51 PM UTC

uberchet wrote: post #136

morganvachon wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a use case thing. I would argue that for most people who actually still use email for communication with peers, images and attachments are an afterthought. For images, we have image hosting sites, and for attachments we have a plethora of cloud hosting services that allow you to send a link instead of the entire attachment. That said, there's a happy medium between console based email and bloated, buggy clients…

> I would argue that for most people who actually still use email for communication with peers, images and attachments are an afterthought. Are you actually convinced of that, or are you being inflammatory? Because, in 2017, it's hilariously far afield of most folks' email use patterns both at work and at home. Do you only ever communicate using text -- and plain text at that? I work for a small software company - ie…

My email client is text only. Of course I have it setup that I can easily extract all attachments and then point a web browser at them.

In my experience, it is rare that I need to look at an image or pdf, etc.

I'm not doing web development, so there is no particular reason any colleague would send me a screenshot.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#172

Post by gkya » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 3:58 PM UTC

szastupov wrote: post #78

I spent quiet some time setting up mutt or trying to make a real IDE out of vim or Emacs, but in the end it's just cargo cult and waste of time. There a modern email clients, IDEs, polished operating systems, etc., all built in this century. There is absolutely no need in wasting time scoring nerd points.

People work in different ways. I live in emacs and am a humanities student, nobody sees my computer and I don't have a friend that can quit vi for his life, but I use the software that I use because it worjs the best for me. I have a very organised inbox, a good list of feeds, and a nice setup for org and orgexport. I can create jawdropping document with a quarter of the effort my peers spend to create a half arsed one in Word. I am on top of all thenews with asimple press of the G button in elfeed and 15 minutes readin, while my peers miss exams because nobodytold them. The only place I am behind is Facebook which I deliberately don't use. So no need for blanket dismissals.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#173

Post by u801e » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 4:07 PM UTC

leblancfg wrote: post #160

ajross wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long-time internet tradition has the replies going inline with the quoted message, with judicious trimming of irrelevant bits. It's frustrating that this has to be explained in the modern world. Smart young developers exist who have literally never seen a discussion that works that way.

For most messaging in larger organisations, having "paper trail"-style replies that you can forward to others has its advantages -- it better delimits in a single page who said what, and when. If I know my conversation is intended to a small group I'll reply inline, but my default is quote-on-top.

> For most messaging in larger organisations, having "paper trail"-style replies that you can forward to others has its advantages

That brings up another point about using email for group conversations. If organizations hosted their own NNTP servers and commonly installed email clients also supported communication via NNTP, then this wouldn't be a problem. All messages already posted to a group would be visible to anyone who joins it at a later time. That's not the case with an email discussion that gets Cc'd to someone at a later time (since they don't have any of the earlier messages in their mailbox).

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#174

Post by u801e » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 4:09 PM UTC

bananaboy wrote: post #62

torrent-of-ions wrote: post #18

I started using emacs for email back in my uni days. I used Dovecot to run an IMAP server locally which would get my mail when it could. This made it very quick in emacs because it wouldn't have to wait for any remote server. But, unfortunately, I had to go back to Thunderbird. With the exception of free software mailing lists, people simply do not know how to use email. Bottom quoting is the default. We can thank Mi…

I agree, it's a losing battle. Such a shame. I have one or two friends who quote inline, and I love getting emails from them. They look so clean and readable. But it's pointless trying to do it with most people because most people don't reply with inline quotes and just top post and it ends up as a godawful mess. So I barely even bother any more myself. I die a little every time.

These days, I just delete the entire block of text and post my response to thost types of emails :)

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#175

Post by gkya » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 4:09 PM UTC

szastupov wrote: post #100

nazri1 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is an IDE can only do so much - depending solely on the IDE mean your ability to change/refactor the code is limited to exactly what the IDE gives you. If you need to do something that the IDE can't do for you then you're stuck. This is when being competent in Vim/Emacs/Shell is an advantage.

But you can extend IDEs just as well as you extend your vim/emacs. Not to mention, that for some users it's more convenient to hack extensions in Python (Sublime), Javascript/Coffee (Atom) or Typescript (vscode), rather than in weird dialect of lisp (lisp is cool, I encourage everyone to go and read SICP, but not elisp) or even worse, vim script.

Elisp is a good lisp. Certainly not the best, but quite workable, and very pleasing when the environment it's in is taken into account. Emacs is open source, has better apps than Sublime,not a web page like atom and not code centric like vs code. But maybe sublime and atom could provide a similar environment as they have the tools to create parallel ones. Butnothing like org and gnus exist elsewhere, unfortunately.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#176

Post by uberchet » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 4:12 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #23

MikeTaylor wrote: post #21

This is all very nice, but the fact that the article doesn't even _mention_ images or attachments shows how divorced it is from the reality of most people's email experience. I happily used emacs as my mail-reader from 1989 to about 2009 (first RMAIL mode, then VM). The increasing importance of non-text formats made it cumbersome, and I somewhat reluctantly switched to GMail. It's hard to imagine switching back now.

the only images i find are either from spammy adverts or tracking pixels. Normal people don't put images in emails. As for attachments, you can open them in their native programs just fine.

>Normal people don't put images in emails

This is absolutely not true. Generally speaking, people whose experience leads them to think this are in weird isolated silos where highly technical folks are overrepresented.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#177

Post by bitwize » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 4:12 PM UTC

rekado wrote: post #91

szastupov wrote: post #78

I spent quiet some time setting up mutt or trying to make a real IDE out of vim or Emacs, but in the end it's just cargo cult and waste of time. There a modern email clients, IDEs, polished operating systems, etc., all built in this century. There is absolutely no need in wasting time scoring nerd points.

Emacs is not just an editor and mention it next to vim or mutt indicates that you misunderstand what Emacs tries to be. Emacs gives you tight integration for everything that could possibly be represented as a buffer. Emacs is programmable glue between applications, a better "shell". The desire to do all things in Emacs is because Emacs lets you do it and because it reduces context switching. For more on why one would…

Yeah, except no.

The vi vs. Emacs editor wars are over and Emacs lost. The new struggle is between vim and modern IDEs and IDE-like editors (Atom, Sublime, etc.).

There are reasons for this. Vim is retro like beehive hairdos; Emacs is retro like casual workplace sexism. The buffer implementation in Emacs sucks. Once you start opening huge files or running shell tasks that spew a lot of output, Emacs chokes hard and because it's not multithreaded, pegs your CPU and locks up your terminal, in buffer sizes that modern editors handle easily.

Also, Elisp is slow, contains warts the Lisp community has long since fixed, and is in general a millstone around everybody's necks.

Also, the UI. Just... the UI. Wonder why the best way to get a young developer to use Emacs is to reskin it like vim (evil-mode, Spacemacs)?

Editors, even all-in-one kitchen-sink editors, have moved on from Emacs. Just let it go.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#178

Post by uberchet » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 4:14 PM UTC

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #60

kingosticks wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inline images are incredibly helpful when explaining things via email, which can be hard enough as it is. Imagine a textbook where all the diagrams were at the end of the chapter and you had to keep flicking between pages to refer to them. You have to imagine that as it doesn't exist, for some reason.

My colleague makes these images-with-commentary emails every week. For when I need to view those, I hit `H` in mutt, which opens the email in my web browser. It's all quite painless really. https://github.com/jezen/dotfiles/blob/master/.mutt/muttrc#L...

The extra step and use of an external program is pretty inelegant, IMO, when there exist clients that will just show you the damn image in the mail window.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#179

Post by avar » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 4:16 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #164

preek wrote: post #5

Interestingly, I went the other way. I used to have mutt for years, then went through a dark phase (macOS Mail.app, Evernote and Things) and finally concluded to Emacs with mu4e. Integrating mail with Emacs was the best idea ever, because Emails include either todos or serve as reference in projects. Creating todos from Mails as well as linking to them from org-mode is only a shortcut away. I have never had a more ea…

Do you use GMail? If so, how much pain is was to configure your setup to connect to it reliably? And handle multiple e-mail accounts? I ask, because in the past I toyed with switching to using Emacs as my e-mail client, but aways got stuck on configuring the whole setup to work reliably and seamlessly.

I use Emacs + mu4e with 2 GMail accounts (personal & work). AMA I guess.

I use OfflineIMAP to sync the two accounts to ~/Maildir/{work,personal}, then mu4e-context to switch between settings for the two.

I entirely outsource actually sending the mail to a local exim4 daemon which is configured to forward through a GMail smarthost. IMNSHO this is much better than the recommended default configuration of making Emacs actually send the mail, I don't have to worry about not having a network connection at the time, or some other transitory error with a real smtpd retrying the send if needed.

You then may need a tiny hack on top of Debian's default exim configuration to make it switch between different smtp servers / accounts depending on what address you're sending mail from. For reasons I won't go into I send E-Mail through a company-run SMTP server even though I then fetch work E-Mail from GMail.

1. https://wiki.debian.org/GmailAndExim4

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#180

Post by uberchet » Fri, Jun 16, 2017, 4:16 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #107

chii wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the only images i find are either from spammy adverts or tracking pixels. Normal people don't put images in emails. As for attachments, you can open them in their native programs just fine.

>> Normal people don't put images in emails. They shouldn't but they do. Almost every time someone sends me an image I think of a better place they could have put it. Attached to the ticket in our ticketing system, in our bug database, on our file server, etc

Sure they should. It depends on the tools available and the culture of the organization.

You don't get to dictate what features of email people should or shouldn't use.

Apple's Mail.app has a great feature that allows inline markup of images, which is a huge boon for interface discussions and tech support emails at my company.