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Switching to the Mutt Email Client

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Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#31

Post by grive »

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.

Images are opened like any image on your system: by using an image viewer.

For non-text formats, I only deal with HTML. For them, I pipe the mail through a terminal-based browser before reading it. All of this is done automatically, literally a one-line configuration in the proper file, a thing that is explained at length in most mutt guides.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#32

Post by microtonal »

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…

I have also been using an emacs (spacemacs) + org + mu4e setup for 6 months or so. Unfortunately, everything seems to be really buggy and break at random moments. Also, there isn't a really good iOS integration story.

So, I am slowly retracting and going back to vim, Mail.app, Things (and mutt every now and then ;)).

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#33

Post by skratlo »

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 then don't use email for creative work involving designs, mockups, sketches, etc. And yes, it kind of sucks to have the image opened out of its context in new window. Did you notice how HTML got successful by interleaving text and images?

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#34

Post by u801e »

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…

> 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 Microsoft for that one, I think. I can't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to attach the previous message to the bottom. Most people just accept this as the way email is and never question how unbelievably stupid it is.

I think a lot of email clients expect that type of quoting/top-posting (conversation view for example). Another problem is that certain mobile email clients make it impossible to not bottom-quote. That is, they just present a composition window and don't give you the ability to position your text within the quoted email you're responding to.

Though I do find it interesting that people on Hacker news, Slashdot, and reddit will generally follow the convention of responding inline if they quote the parent post in their response. I don't recall anyone ever following the email "convention" of bottom-quoting.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#35

Post by skratlo »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #22
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.

Richard Stallman (RMS) uses emacs for email as well. I can't imagine it. Too much valuable information comes in the form of rich emails for me to even try.

He's not getting rich emails, he's only getting patches. Works for him. Wouldn't work for me.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#36

Post by matthiasl »

vincentkriek wrote: post #8
worldsayshi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article seems to think that everyone should switch away from HTML. But how well does console clients deal with HTML emails. It's not like you can tell everyone to stop sending you HTML.

What made me switched back to Mutt was the ability to call subapplications to show you emails. As I always have a browser running, I can tell mutt to show it in firefox, which allows me to watch the HTML mail in all of it's glory (instead of a lynx like dump in the console which I do not like).

I do exactly this too for the occasional mail that I really can't read as plain text.

One concern is that I'm letting through all web bugs and, perhaps, outright malicious HTML. If anyone has a solution for that, something like filtering the HTML, I'd love to hear it.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#37

Post by LaSombra »

oblio wrote: post #15

I feel that the folks that do this aren't working for big companies. In most big companies you can't really afford to do any email client shenanigans. You probably need to see HTML emails, handle calendar invites, etc.

The company I work for is big-ish, ~10k, and many use mutt, emacs, Thunderbird and some even use a mailing-listnntp with slrn.

I think it all depends on which area of work you are in. For software engineering folks it works just fine.

I for one use mutt and handle calendar invites with gcalcli, I can use LDAP lookup and HTML mails are converted using elinks and read inside mutt. If I want to see all the fanciness I just open the text/html attachment in Firefox.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#38

Post by collyw »

grive wrote: post #31
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.

Images are opened like any image on your system: by using an image viewer. For non-text formats, I only deal with HTML. For them, I pipe the mail through a terminal-based browser before reading it. All of this is done automatically, literally a one-line configuration in the proper file, a thing that is explained at length in most mutt guides.

Wouldn't it just be easier to use a graphical client that does that sort of thing by default?

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#39

Post by juanre »

I switched back to mutt 5 months ago, when my startup started to grow fast and I needed a sensible way to deal with lots of email in multiple accounts. I haven't looked back. I still have gmail as a back-end, but I use mbsync to keep local copies of all my accounts, and msmtp to send mail.

Some resources I found helpful:

- http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/ (good, but it recommends offlineimap — I tried it and found it to be slow and buggy. mbsync is much better.)

- https://github.com/cbracken/mutt

- https://lukespear.co.uk/mutt-multiple-accounts-mbsync-notmuc...

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#40

Post by 101km »

collyw wrote: post #38
grive wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Images are opened like any image on your system: by using an image viewer. For non-text formats, I only deal with HTML. For them, I pipe the mail through a terminal-based browser before reading it. All of this is done automatically, literally a one-line configuration in the proper file, a thing that is explained at length in most mutt guides.

Wouldn't it just be easier to use a graphical client that does that sort of thing by default?

There is a perverse kind of joy in making it work the hard way.
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