undefined | Better HN

0 pointsubernostrum12y ago0 comments

I have taken the time to try to work with Mutt, and some other console email tools. I would love to be using something like that full-time, since I practically live in terminal windows.

But ultimately I can't; I don't need pretty colors or graphical tricks. I do need something which understands that it's not 1975 anymore. My mail no longer lives in a local spool file, and there is no longer a local sendmail. I have multiple email addresses, which use IMAP, and remote SMTP.

And none of the console clients -- including Mutt -- can really do that. Every couple years I try Mutt again, and try whatever the current crop of attempted successors are, and get thrown right back into 1975 again and give up in frustration.

(and Mutt, last I checked, actually considers it both a feature and a point of philosophical purity/pride to refuse to acknowledge the fact that anything other than "shell out to local sendmail" exists. Also, IMAP was unbearably slow, usually requiring a full re-fetch/re-index of the entire remote inbox, potentially hundreds of thousands of messages, every time Mutt started up, and multiple IMAP accounts were an unholy mess)

0 comments

5 comments · 4 top-level

yrro12y ago· 1 in thread

While I find working with multiple accounts awkward, I find that Mutt has no problem submitting mail via SMTP; and once I enable message header & body caching, IMAP accounts become perfectly fast to use.

microtonal12y ago

And if you have GMail, you can patch it to do server-side search as well:

http://people.spodhuis.org/phil.pennock/software/mutt-patche...

Still, I like Mail.app better, since it supports multiple accounts well and has excellent search.

nieve12y ago

As far as console clients go Mew does very well with imap, in fact more reliably than most of the gui clients I've tried. It happily pulled down multi-GB Gmail mailboxes and kept them in sync without any issues, has sane disconnected-mode behavior, handled network failures well, etc. It's implemented inside emacs, but you don't have to be a heavy emacs user to use it and one of the vi-emulation modes might help if not. Built-in ssh tunneling support; good support for mime, pgp, s/mime; and pluggable search options were what convinced me. It depends on stunnel for ssl/tls, but I'm happy they're not reimplementing support. The manual could use some work, but it's relatively extensive.

https://github.com/kazu-yamamoto/Mew http://www.mew.org/en/info/release/

jlgaddis12y ago

Like you, I have several different e-mail accounts (all "remote") and send through a number of different mail servers (depending on the account, of course). I use mutt 99% of the time, on my laptop, wherever I may be (home, friends' homes, customer sites, public hotspots, etc.). I couldn't (easily) do it with just mutt but with the help of various external tools (such as offlineimap, msmtp, and notmuch) I have no problems or hoops to jump through on a daily basis to make things work.

stevekemp12y ago

You might enjoy my new scriptable client then, although it suffers from a few design decisions I believe are acceptable:

* Maildir only. * Shell out to sendmail.

I do enjoy scripting though; for example viewing all unread messages regardless of folder, or marking messages as read based on regexps.

http://lumail.org/

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse