Mutt 2.0 Release Notes(mutt.org) |
Mutt 2.0 Release Notes(mutt.org) |
1. I can edit and compose emails in my favourite editor
2. Near instantaneous launch
3. Can launch multiple instances, allowing for viewing/searching to happen concurrently
4. Rapid search with advanced searching features - i.e. find all emails that have 1 or more attachments sent to me from within a month of 1/1/2019 from someone with a "csu" email - would be l ~f csu ~X > 0 ~d 1/1/2019*1m
5. Deal rapidly with emails - I have 'd' for delete and move to next and 'y' for archive and move to next, I can zip through emails quicker than on any other email client I have used
6. I can work effectively when I'm offline or have patchy internet/signal (i.e. on a train) using mbsync or similar to store emails locally and sync up with my gmail account when I have internet.
7. Highly configurable - custom set-up for what data I want to see in my inbox, and what colours to use and what to highlight
8. Intelligent reply-all - it knows I have several email aliases that belong to me so I don't reply to myself
Personally I find the need for HTML email extremely unusual (maybe once every year or two?). My guess is that, for the average Mutt user, it's less than that.
[1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/36881/sending-html-...
I went through a CLI-only phase where I didn't use a desktop environment. My "DE" was just tmux in a pseudo-terminal. The main reason I went back to a graphical workstation was a need for G Suite and Slack's horrible support for Weechat. Mutt was a critical member of the toolkit and I have fond memories of hyper productivity. Search was crap though.
If you're thinking about doing this, I recommend trying to live in a VM running Fedora Server or Arch or Ubuntu Server or something. If you find yourself unable to use a CLI browser for some reason, at least you don't have to tell work "sorry I gotta install my OS before I can look at <thing>" (that doesn't go over well).
i use sup (which is where notmuch came from) because it provides on-the-fly virtual folders where emails match a search query or a tag. i can also open multiple folders at once and switch between them without loosing state. it's been a while, but when i last used mutt it could not do that
Neomutt probably has better integration. I've never tried because I switched to the Emacs Notmuch MUA package.
I find the integration of Emacs packages much better than ncurses CLIs which, unlike non-interactive Unix applications, tend to compose badly. They are little silos.
Mutt has an excellent UI design, though. Once learnt, it's really fast to use.
It did, however, teach me a healthy appreciation for the benefits of pushing parts of my workflow into the terminal whenever possible. The terminal is distraction-free, highly scriptable, and your mode of interaction is always the same (type things!). Afterwards I ended up switching to Xubuntu + i3wm and never looked back. I've still got a copy of Windows 10 on a random machine and I interact with Macs occasionally, and it really seems like little of importance has been introduced to the graphical desktop paradigm since at least Windows 2000.
Can relate so much. Tried to go CLI only, switched back, but I settled to use a WM (sway).
Sorry if I'm missing the point, but why does using a terminal program require a whole separate OS? Or, conversely, why does using a graphical program force you to ditch all your terminal programs? Couldn't you just switch to a separate pseudo-tty, or even just use a maximised terminal window? You can switch between terminal programs with the usual tmux key bindings while still being able to "exit" to the GUI when needed.
These are web apps? You should be able to have CLI-work style and still browse the web. Use something like Vimium for Firefox and a WM.
Really looking forward to this. This was the one notable issue I had with mutt: if you lose your connection, it would forget which mails you marked as read, deleted, etc.
Seems like the number 3 item you would want to nail down in a mail-client. But I'm sure it is just me that haven't looked into it yet. Unfortunately I just can't find time for it for the time being.
Mutt was my preferred email client back in 2000-2004. But gave it up for Gmail web interface.
I have kind of given up on e-mail... I don't even check it daily for work, and a few times a week personally. I use gmail because they do a really good job of spam filtering and I don't have to deal with infrastructure.
> If you sometimes forget a pattern modifier, you can type Tab after the ~ to get a list of pattern modifiers.
these are useful to quickly filter for a string in the From: or any other header field
I put together a console based client, inspired by mutt, but fully developed and configured with Lua to resolve that problem - https://lumail.org/
I had a good few years working on it, and really liked the way it was "modal". Sadly I never quite got enough users to be worth continuing with. These days I pay for gsuite instead, and use offline IMAP only to keep a backup of the remote mails.
It was an interesting thing to work on, and I've been following the new aerc client to see what happens there. I'm sure there is still room for new console based mail-clients, perhaps mine was just a bit too unfamiliar!
For instance, there is no consistent way to cancel actions / exit prompts (or none that I noticed), while pressing <Esc> does nothing. I know terminals have issues with <Esc> but even double <Esc> just gives you ^[^[.
I use shift-F in Mutt to flag emails. I then lose track of them, because I have too many flagged emails!
Task-based tagging might be better (using Notmuch) but I haven't found a good workflow for this yet.
Contrary to the other point, having a local copy of my emails gives me a sense of security and I can set up scripts using normal scripting tools to move stuff around. `notmuch` is good, but actually I can meet most of my searching needs with a 'limit' filter.
I use mutt with gmail account (and with everything else, although primarily I use my self-hosted email server). Works fine with gmail.
> But gave it up for Gmail web interface.
The web interface is so inferior, I can't imagine using it by choice (I'm forced by $EMPLOYER to use the gmail web interface, so I suffer through that pain daily).
Anywhere that I have a choice, I use mutt.
I'd like to know why you gave it up for gmail. Is it because of the way terminal programs look?
One thing that was a pain point in the past was offline use. If your mail provider is IMAP only then you need to hack stuff together to use offline. As a paranoid freak I prefer to have offline copies of everything.
That's one valid reason but it's unfortunate IMO to see it that way.
Mutt (and similar, although I use mutt) are just so much inherently better than any web interface can ever be. The configurability and access to pipe content to other processes cannot be matched.
Then you just point mutt at the local copy instead of the IMAP server and it doesn't matter if you're online or offline.
I use these tools for email: Getmail -> sortmail -> mutt
Getmail just gets the email (pop or imap). sortmail is an MDA I wrote to replace procmail. It basically just filters emails into maildir folders. Mutt to read and respond to the emails.
> alias gmail='mutt -F ~/.mutt/muttrc_imap_gmail'
They do have a bit of regressions from time to time, but they are fairly quick to respond with workarounds and fix it.
I still recommend mutt Wizard though because it makes it so much easier to get everything set up. I feel like it should be absorbed into neomutt or similar because it feels like such a basic thing to get right.
isync/mbsync are rock-solid on the other hand and were really easy to set up.
Coincidentally, I used to use sup and it is my favorite mail client that I've used. At the time there was no way to sync changes back to maildir or some format that IMAP could sync. Is that still the case?
I'd like a mail client as capable as mutt, but that also works whether I'm online or not, handles mail sync automatically in the background while I start processing those mails, lets me browse and search and draft responses offline, and has a built-in idea of "has that mail been sent yet?" rather than just saying "sent" the moment a mail goes into another queue the client doesn't manage without giving any status for when it actually gets sent. And all that while also leaving mail on the server so that other mail clients such as K-9 mail on my phone (which can do all those things) can also process mail.
Sometimes I like "programs that do one thing well". But doing mail well involves taking full responsibility for mail.
FWIW aerc does have all this built-in, but also offers the possibility to just hand off responsibility to external programs. As far as I'm concerned, I use the built-in email sender. Unfortunately, the built-in emails fetcher does not work well with poor internet connection or offline. That's why I use offlineimap to sync maildirs every 5 mins, and notmuch is just the icing on the cake for fast search/indexing.