Mutt 2.0 Release Notes (opens in new tab)

Mutt's still really useful. Need to deal with plain text messages or whole message bodies to send around to different places on the internet? Then mutt's what you need. Huge mail boxes that choke outlook? Mutt. I don't use it often these days but a mutt setup is super-handy.

How do you send html emails? write the tags manually and sending it as text/html ?

I you revisit, be sure to check out notmuch as the search backend. It is super fast and has a nice and powerful search syntax.

[1] https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-mutt/

I still regularly do work without an X server booted up, and I feel it's a tremendous aid to my focus and productivity. And to an extent my happiness too: I feel like I'm using a computer again, something I've loved since I was very young, and which lately has taken a back seat to apps (mostly web-based) built around the metaphor of being in a series of crowded, noisy rooms.

Mutt, plus a notmuch backend, has excellent search capabilities. Operators meet or exceed what Gmail offers both in terms of speed and features.

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.

Search was crap?! It's one of the main reasons I stick to mutt - being able to rapidly search through all my emails using several criteria is great. I find gmail and outlook terrible in comparison. I also have not-much configured, but I find I don't need it too often (just when searching the body text).

I also have fond memories of mutt, and some of my coworkers still use it on our IMAP server. I've vacillated over the years between mutt, Thunderbird, and Gmail depending on the company and capabilities. Recently I've played with using Outlook desktop (after a week or two with Outlook for the web) because of better teams and meetings integration (it's an ISP, we have our own HA dovecot cluster and an exchange system for employees, but we can get mail in either reliability with some procmail and exchange rules). The only thing Outlook has over Thunderbird or mutt are the aforementioned exchange integrations, buttery smooth cursor movement (it had been so long since I used MS Word I forgot about that, and it's nice), and the ability to set conditional rules to not just set color on messages in a folder, but font and font size. Having unread items not just a different color but bold and bigger is pretty cool. Not sure how mutt would support that, but I think some newer terms might open up the capability...

I tried to go CLI only at one point but never quite got there.

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.

> 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).

Can relate so much. Tried to go CLI only, switched back, but I settled to use a WM (sway).

> "sorry I gotta install my OS before I can look at <thing>"

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.

This was the reason for me personally switching from alpine to mutt. One day I realized the only place I could find a copy of the source was on my own harddrive and that's when I bit the bullet and started figuring out the mutt UI/config.

> The main reason I went back to a graphical workstation was a need for G Suite and Slack's horrible support for Weechat.

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.

I use weeslack for my Slack integration, and still live just about 100% in the terminal.

I switched to neomutt a while ago.

Its been a while since I used Mutt extensively (lets say about 15 years) but IIRC you could use $ to sync the changes, though you'd have to do it manually.

That's what drove me initially to aerc + notmuch

Yes, set up with Luke Smith's excellent mutt Wizard [0].

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.

[0] https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard

I use Mutt with gmail. For a while I hooked it up to read off the internet, but eventually I switched to OfflineIMAP, then to isync. For sending I us msmtp. Both are pretty straightforward to configure, especially compared to mutt itself. I'd definitely recommend using notmuch if you do decide to keep that local copy of your mail, the search is pretty incredible.

Definitely worth it. Two reasons: first, you can use it using your muscle memory (think vim), and second: it's fast. Many people nowadays are used to this (usually) slight lag in whatever you do via the web interfaces, but using something that reacts immediately is much nicer, at least to me.

> Does anyone use Mutt with gmail or alikes today? Is it worth it?

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.

It's almost unthinkable to me that you consider/ed gmail to be better. mutt was miles ahead of gmail already back then, and the difference just grew with the various gmail redesigns.

I'd like to know why you gave it up for gmail. Is it because of the way terminal programs look?

Mutt and Gmail work fine together. I always find myself opening up the web UI when I need to search, though. I’ve taken a a few steps down the notmuch path a few times but it feels like such a big Thing to have to set up a whole local mail system just for search.

I'm considering it now that my nostalgia is flaring up.

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.

How about for the xoauth imap connection stuff gmail requires?

Yes.

> alias gmail='mutt -F ~/.mutt/muttrc_imap_gmail'

I was often frustrated there wasn't a complete scripting language integrated with Mutt, so people had to make hacks to do things in a fully scriptable fashion.

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!

i see your point

It’s control-G. Effective use of Mutt requires at least skimming the manual.

Use shift-F to mark the email as “flag”. It's exactly the same functionality as Gmail's starring, and maps to it over IMAP.