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Switching to the Mutt Email Client

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Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#231

Post by Samon »

zhengyi13 wrote: post #184
pyre wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of software for working with Google services via the CLI. Your biggest hurdle is probably that POP/IMAP is disabled for email.

Naively, I could see wanting to disable POP given the potential for inadvertent mail loss, but what justification could there be for disabling IMAP?

"Data Leakage Protection". The idea being that the everything that ever goes in or out of a mailbox is recorded, audited, etc. Yes, deleting an email/thread doesn't remove it from Vault, but this way, other than copying/pasting from the browser window into another client, there is always a trail of where an email went, and users can't "take home" a dump of their entire mailbox. When legal get involved and need a dump of "every email between employee X and external party Y", there is no question of whether a different SMTP server was used so we may not have a record of the sent messages, etc.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#232

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

_acme wrote: post #223
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still a stupid reason. There is a MIME type for emails, so you can attach emails to emails, retaining their identity as emails, so the receiving MUA can display the emails you receive as an attachment just like any other emails, including the user interface for replying to them, or whatever. Also, there is threading information in email headers. So, it is actually trivial to just gather together all the emails…

While arguably it's Gmail's fault, there are email clients, such as Gmail, that do not behave well with, or perhaps support at all, emails as attachments. When emailing people who use Gmail (as personal email or as the host of their work email), sending emails as attachments just doesn't work well.

Well, yeah, sure, there is terrible software out there. But if you expect everyone you communicate with to live with terrible usability because you insist on using broken software, then you are just being an asshole. Email is an open, federated system, you can just switch to different client software.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#233

Post by _acme »

scbrg wrote: post #208
CPLX wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My message to you is right there in the same thread in my client. Don't send it back to me. Dozens of times a day I add someone to the cc list when I'm replying to an email. I suspect most people that have an assistant (or are one, or collaborate with others in general) do this constantly. It's an incredibly common use case. Should we all abandon this very common behavior in order to avoid your scorn?

> Dozens of times a day I add someone to the cc list Incidentally, your daily dosage coincides with the amount of times I've had to do the same thing at all since I started using email some twenty five years ago. > It's an incredibly common use case For some, perhaps. On the other hand, I'd suggest that another, at least for me more common use case is to know exactly what is being replied to. Which is possible with p…

If you don't cc people all the time, I can't believe you've used email for any business purpose.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#234

Post by _acme »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #232
_acme wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While arguably it's Gmail's fault, there are email clients, such as Gmail, that do not behave well with, or perhaps support at all, emails as attachments. When emailing people who use Gmail (as personal email or as the host of their work email), sending emails as attachments just doesn't work well.

Well, yeah, sure, there is terrible software out there. But if you expect everyone you communicate with to live with terrible usability because you insist on using broken software, then you are just being an asshole. Email is an open, federated system, you can just switch to different client software.

There are many organizations that use Gmail to host their email but do not allow third party email clients (i.e., IMAP and POP are turned off).

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#235

Post by _jal »

szastupov wrote: post #209
_jal wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry it didn't work for you, but your hostility about it gives me the impression you became frustrated configuring advanced stuff that perhaps you don't understand or need. If you never, say, want to select a group of messages based on a regular expression, absolutely, stick with Outlook or whatever. If you never need different contextual handling (say, signing mail only from a particular account, add particular…

Sorry, I didn't mean it to be hostile. But you're right, I'm expressing my frustration, perhaps a bit sarcastically. Of course everyone's needs and preference are different, I'm not trying to say I am the source of wisdom, just sharing my thoughts, you know ;)

Totally fine - I do devops; software ensures my life is suffused with constant low-grade hostility.

Mutt is a bit old-school. It absolutely assumes rather more familiarity with how mail works than most other MUAs, and the configuration isn't very... ergonomic is the wrong word, but close. Combined with man(1) style docs, there isn't a good way to distinguish obscure knobs one would rarely want to touch from things everyone configures, for instance, unless you're already pretty familiar with what's going on.

In a past life, I spent a noticeable fraction of my career dealing with email from several angles, and love mutt. But if you've made healthier choices, I can absolutely see being bewildered and frustrated by it.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#236

Post by stevekemp »

guyzmo wrote: post #97
seuss1969 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you should try looking at NeoMutt (www.neomutt.org). It's a pseudo fork of Mutt that has added a lot of new features. Recently it landed full Lua scripting support as well. Guess you're not the only one that was looking for more powerful configuration within mutt.

I'm guilty of the Lua feature, and even though it's only covering the existing muttrc API, it can already do quite a lot. The Lua feature is (not yet) turned on by default at compile time (and thus in systems distributions). I'd be very happy to have more feedback and help to extend further that API and have some great scripts happening!

I think the point where Lua gets interesting is when it can be invoked when a new message is received, or you can iterate over message heads & the message-list(s) and process them automatically.

For example you might have a folder of "backup results", you'd want to mark all that have a subject of "Backup OK" as read, and flag the ones that have a subject of "Backup FAILED" as "important". Those are the kind of tasks I automate with my lua-based mail-client.

You can get more interesting and say "Keep only the most recent 100 messages in folder XXX" which applies whenever you either launch the client, or open a given folder too.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#237

Post by erikb »

uberchet wrote: post #195
erikb wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the last 10 years I have worked with 4 digits worth of people. Managers, sales people, engineers, family members, locals, Western foreigners, Arab foreigners, Asian foreigners. I can't remember a single communication where direct insertion of images was a desired feature. If at all images were in emails because the email clients interpreted adding attachments in image format as part of the emails content (gmail…

I'd argue, in turn, that your experience, regardless of how many people were involved, is divergent from the way in which email itself is moving in the broader market of users. Images as links to something else, that require an additional step, are an inferior substitute to inline images. Here in 2017, it's possible to build an email that includes tables or screenshots or other rich media that exist as part of the em…

But where is this kind of email happening besides the spam box? The way you argue this should be common and hit me in the face every day no matter my resistance. What I see is that less and less fluff is added to emails. A lot of work emails don't even contain a footer anymore, less and less people actually use greeting formulas, in some regards the whole communication moved from emails to other media like social media (even at work, where it is just a inhouse FB clone instead of the original).

Can you name a few examples of such rich media emails you recently received or sent and to/from whom (categorywise, e.g. family member, colleague, customer, department type)?

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#238

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

_acme wrote: post #234
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah, sure, there is terrible software out there. But if you expect everyone you communicate with to live with terrible usability because you insist on using broken software, then you are just being an asshole. Email is an open, federated system, you can just switch to different client software.

There are many organizations that use Gmail to host their email but do not allow third party email clients (i.e., IMAP and POP are turned off).

And those organizations could change that, right?

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#239

Post by zafiro17 »

I'm late to this conversation: happy to see such a robust discussion on mutt, but sad to see so many hardcore techies preferring gmail instead. To each their own, of course, but mutt is one of the things I love most about *nix platforms. I've got a chromebox that requires I use webmail (the Fastmail web client is really, good actually) but elsewhere, mutt is the only way I can handle email.

To the comment about mutt's poor addressbook support, you can use it with a CLI/CUI app called addressbook that's quite good, and you can interface with with other addressbook scripts to access carddav servers as well. I'm intrigued by the links to carddav support.

For me, the HTML email and calendar invite issues are trivial, and grossly outweighed by the efficiency I get with mutt by being able to select and act on huge amounts of mail at once. The threaded view is essential. In a pinch, I use sylpheed/claws or even Thunderbird. But after using mutt at home, going to work where I'm forced to use Outlook makes me want to claw my eyes out: in my opinion, Outlook has gotten worse every year, and is barely useable at this point.

Meanwhile in mutt, I can do things like "delete every message between dates X and Y and sent by person Z." It makes dealing with huge amounts of mail effortless. I also tire of editors, and cycle repeatedly through emacs, vim, slrn, and joe/jstar/jmacs - I love the flexibility. I combine it with Fastmail/IMAP, and wouldn't dream of going anywhere else. Gmail isn't for me: if it works for a lot of you, congrats - I'm past the point where I care about converting others to what I consider "the one true way." Just wanted to add to the conversation my opinion that the day they I can't use mutt for email is the day I stop emailing, period.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#240

Post by rekado »

bitwize wrote: post #177
rekado wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

I don't think your comparisons are constructive.

I learned vim first and later switched to Emacs because it allows me to integrate all tasks in the same work environment. The defaults are admittedly terrible and it's certainly far from perfect. But I don't see any alternative that works better for the things that I use Emacs for. I am looking forward to eventually be using Guile instead of Elisp, though.

Curious that you mention the UI as a negative(?) --- the Emacs UI is pretty good actually and it's very extensible.

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