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Himalaya: CLI to Manage Emails

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Re: Himalaya: CLI to Manage Emails

#41

Post by leephillips »

BeetleB wrote: post #38
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that email should be plain text, but honestly I don't think that's really relevant to the question. I read the question as "why CLI instead of GUI", which I think is totally fair. Using a CLI email client instead of a GUI strikes me like using your feet to open jars - maybe you can do it, but it's so much harder for no benefit.

> Using a CLI email client instead of a GUI strikes me like using your feet to open jars - maybe you can do it, but it's so much harder for no benefit. Eh? I used to use mutt and now use notmuch. Much simpler to use than, say, Outlook. Not sure what you're talking about being "harder".

Absolutely right. Every GUI email client that I’ve tried is clumsy and slow. Mutt is elegant, powerful, and fast.

https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/

Re: Himalaya: CLI to Manage Emails

#42

Post by bovermyer »

dotancohen wrote: post #17
bovermyer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm here too. I've used many, many different clients over the last few decades (yes, including Linux `mail`). I have to use Outlook at work, and I have to use my providers' web clients on my Windows gaming PC, but on all my other devices I use Mail.app. I just... don't ever use all the features of the other clients, or don't like some of the behavior they have, or any of that. For a long time I would get excited abou…

I use many features of Thunderbird. And it works fine with outlook, even including calendaring, with the Owl plugin. It is a paid plugin, but it makes life much better.

I've tried to use Thunderbird several times over the years, and I always ended up going to something else. Maybe the UI bothered me, I'm not sure.

Re: Himalaya: CLI to Manage Emails

#44

Post by OJFord »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #36
smartmic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many choices for email client interfaces. HTML for email does not have a good reputation among hackers. After all, email can be considered an ancient technology and is historically based on plain text - HTML breaks not only the philosophy but also many of the tools developed around email. I have found a sweet spot for an email client between a pure CLI and a full-featured (HTML) GUI client - I use Emacs Gnu…

I disagree that email should be plain text, but honestly I don't think that's really relevant to the question. I read the question as "why CLI instead of GUI", which I think is totally fair. Using a CLI email client instead of a GUI strikes me like using your feet to open jars - maybe you can do it, but it's so much harder for no benefit.

It just depends on the user. You probably also think cd & ls is so much harder than Finder or whatever.

Re: Himalaya: CLI to Manage Emails

#46

Post by pandemic_region »

kriops wrote: post #19
szajbus wrote: post #5

After testing many clients I learnt to stop worrying and just use Mail app.

Mail causes me to procrastinate so much, and I have no idea why. I use icloud everything, so I wanted my mail there as well, but after 12-13 months I switched back to FastMail because their UX is subtly better suited to quickly sorting through mail for me. And fwiw I'm afaik not using any FastMail features that Mail doesn't have. I don't mean this in the way that Client A > Client B, but I have spent a fair amount of…

My goal is always to have an empty inbox. So, emails that require some sort of action from my part but are not urgent I will snooze them (Gmail feature) to a later time. Email that's like "ok thanks for letting me know" and that's the end of that interaction, I will delete. Other stuff that requires more immediate attention I'll let it hang in the inbox for at most a few days and then try to act on them.

I noticed that letting mails linger in sight in my inbox is energy draining or causes me to procrastinate.

Re: Himalaya: CLI to Manage Emails

#47

Post by dredmorbius »

zerop wrote: post #11

Honest question - Why use interfaces like this, but not regular HTML client?

There are times it's really useful to access email from a terminal, and terminals are widely available (shell on your primary system, Termux on Android, SSH to your email host, whatevs).

It's also often convenient to either script interactions, or to have full access to shell tools when interacting with email. I practice this more often with mutt, but I can filter either messages or metadata (headers) and send those to an awk or sed pipeline to extract specific information of interest (this is especially useful with notifications / alert emails). This might be tens, hundreds, thousands, or more messages that are of interest.

Full-blown GUI or Web client email tools are pretty, but lack this flexibility.

Re: Himalaya: CLI to Manage Emails

#49

Post by codetrotter »

38 wrote: post #45
tempfile wrote: post #43

Looks like mblaze but with extra steps https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze

last release 2017, good game. also only works on Windows with Linux emulator.

No? Version 1.3 was tagged in the repo September 13 this year.

https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze/tags

And correspondingly of course that’s the version package repos have/will published too.

For example, Alpine Linux has that version in a community package repo on a branch.

https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/community/x86/mbla...

FreeBSD package repo is a little behind, still on v1.2 instead of v1.3. But that’s still a version from March of this year.

https://www.freshports.org/mail/mblaze

And even if the most recent release of mblaze really had been a few years ago, it could still be good software. Especially for email.

Re: Himalaya: CLI to Manage Emails

#50

Post by latchkey »

dewey wrote: post #10
szajbus wrote: post #5

After testing many clients I learnt to stop worrying and just use Mail app.

Indeed, I'm additionally using https://mimestream.com for company Gmail as the Gmail support in Mail.app is sometimes a bit lacking (Labels etc.), but it's also a good way to keep private and work emails separated.

Another vote for mimestream! Was an early free user and love the app. Definitely worth supporting them.
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