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I use it daily. It's a lovely email client. Close to the Unix ideal of doing one thing, and doing it well. Integration with other utilities (notmuch, isync) fo
by nextos 11y ago
I use it daily. It's a lovely email client. Close to the Unix ideal of doing one thing, and doing it well.
Integration with other utilities (notmuch, isync) for indexing and sync'ing is very easy, thanks to close adherence to Unix principles, and gets you a very neat setup. Nothing to envy from Gmail.
- hueving 11y ago>Nothing to envy from Gmail. What do you use for mobile access?
- profeta 11y agonot the commenter you want, but i had both a mobile client (if i am using mutt, that means i can access the imap/pop server from other clients) and the ultimate ssh client on my phone which gave me full mutt, in case i needed to have my procmail filters helping me)
- roel_v 11y agoNavigating any terminal software without a true keyboard is an exercise in frustration. Look, I understand what you're saying, but claiming that an ssh client on a phone is a full-fledged replacement for a touch-optimized UI is disingenuous.
- JoshTriplett 11y agoI use k-9 mail these days, which is OK but doesn't handle huge folders well. However, back when I had an n900 with its hardware keyboard, my mobile mail client was ssh, screen, and mutt.
- elsigh 11y ago> Nothing to envy from Gmail. I switched because of search, which is amazing in gmail and hard in mutt (for me). What do you do?
- profeta 11y ago> search amazing in gmail. really? until a few months ago, you couldn't find anything besides whole words with textual search on gmail. why do people have it's search at such high standards? how bad was the alternative you had?
- fizzbatter 11y agoIt's funny, i have been frustrated since day 1 which gmails search. Granted, it could very likely be user error - as i often forget the set of keywords that might lead me to the email i desire, but regardless i as a user am left frustrated. Since someone may ask, my desires are simple in nature, but i'm sure difficult to implement. I simply want to find an email. On the Google Search side of things, i have often been very impressed by the search results i am able to achieve. Yet for email, it's been far less successful. On Search, i'm able to use synonyms, or hell even vaguely describe (in the case of movies) plots, and often be presented with what i want. On Gmail, it feels like Gmail has no idea about the context or content of my mail (which is arguably their selling point), and instead i'm purely searching by keyword. The frustration is amplified by the fact that Search(proper) works so surprisingly well, i'm sure.
- thesimpsons1022 11y agoSearch has the benefit of all they data they have from the millions of other users who searched the same term and clicked certain results. It also has the backing of Pagerank. Your email is unique to you and doesn't have any of these advantages.
- wodenokoto 11y agoWhat are you talking about? What have you've been missing? Senders name or email? That has always been an option. Has attachments? Been an option since forever. tags? Since forever. date? Available since forever.
- jd3 11y agothe UNIX philosophy died with the advent of the web imo. The emacs editor/Mozilla suite (SeaMonkey) mentality of doing most things and doing them relatively well is the reality we have inherited.
- takeda 11y agoAs someone said (paraphrasing): Emacs is a great operating system, but its text editor could be a little better.
- __jal 11y agoNot the case in my reality. Emacs has always been That Way. And then CERN/Mosaic happened, and browsers (being all-singing, all-dancing environments that do everything from page layout to hosting interpreters and databases, are also big apps) came along. This has not lead to awk becoming an MUA, or tmux adding a flight simulator, or tee offering to store things as PDFs. Nor has it stopped the development of building-block tools - I still see more nifty new things built with more or less the same assumptions than I can play with. The only thing I can think of is that you're referring to GUI apps, at least mostly on Linux. GUIs (or more specifically, what Alan Cooper termed 'sovereign applications', but they are mostly GUIs) are typically subject to Zawinski's Law in ways that command line tools are not. Heck, Mutt is somewhat subject to it, itself, for that reason.
- kingmanaz 11y agoThe UNIX philosophy is still alive and kicking and just a terminal away courtesy of SDF.org.
- norswap 11y agoI personally always felt that "full applications" were disconnected from the Unix philosophy. By definition, such an application does many things: fetch things from the network, display them, sort them, ... it talks many protocols, concerns itself with many I/O systems. I'm certainly not saying that it is the way to go, but a real Unix philosophy way of dealing with email would be to use a command to pull mails from a mail server as text files (heck, as a text stream!), then other commands to display them, sort them, ...
- lfam 11y agoI think a lot of Mutt users do what you are describing. I use mbsync to synchronize my mail over IMAP with my remote mailserver. I use mu to index it for search. I use msmtp to send mail. And I use mutt to read and write mail.
- nextos 11y agoWell, mutt is close to what you say. It's just a MUA [1]. That is, it just reads emails on a local mailfolder. Fetching emails to that mailfolder from the server, sending emails and doing other operations is a task of 3rd party programs. [1] OK, it has a few addons for lazy people. But most experienced users ignore them.
- adrusi 11y agoThat's what mutt is. You can compile it with support for imap and smtp, and most packaged versions of it are built that way, but the traditional way of using it is just as way of reading and sorting emails. Fetching emails from the server is done by a POP or IMAP agent (I use offlineimap), sending mail is handled by an smtp agent (I use msmtp), composing emails is done with $EDITOR. I don't think that mutt is the most unix-philosophy-aligned MUA possible, it feels kind of like GNU tools: unixy, but jam packed with too many flags and options and convenience features. The unix philosophy would prefer that the application's design be changed to better accomodate implementing those extra features externally where plausible. But the perfect unix MUA would do the same things as mutt.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
- yoodenvranx 11y ago> Close to the Unix ideal of doing one thing, and doing it well. In my opinion this concept does not work for most non-cli programs. How do you actually define this "one thing"? Is "reading an email" one thing? And "writing an email" another thing? What about "spellchecking the email"? What about "managing all my email contacts"? What about "back up my emails"? What about "sign email with GPG"? Do all of these things really need a separate program? The unix principle works quite well for stuff like grep/find/awk but there is just now way you could make GIMP follow the unix principle.
- bliti 11y agoHave you used the app yourself? Could you maybe talk more about what you did not like about it?
- narag 11y agoI did and liked it very much. Still the person you are responding to has a valid point IMO.
- JadeNB 11y agoMy own idea of the Unix ideal—I don't know how it accords with others'—is that there's nothing wrong with having an umbrella program that brings many pieces together, as long as those pieces are modular. That is, I have no problem with being able to read, write, spellcheck, and sign an e-mail, manage my contacts, and back up my archive from within a single program; but it had better be true that, if I want to use vi instead of Nano to write my e-mails, then I can force the program to respect this wish. (As is probably apparent, I'm a Pine user by experience; I've never used Mutt, but would like to give it a try.)
- nextos 11y agoWell, in case of mutt, it's just reading email from a local maildir. That is, a MUA (mail user agent) in it's own jargon. Mostly everything else is outsourced. Composing is done by your $EDITOR, sending is done by an external program, fetching email by an external program too. Even indexing and querying is usually outsourced to a modern xapian-based tool, like mu or notmuch. This leads to powerful composable workflows.
- nickysielicki 11y agoI wish I could interface NNTP and RSS feeds with Mutt somehow.
- k2enemy 11y agoI've been using rss2email (https://github.com/wking/rss2email https://github.com/wking/rss2email) to read rss feeds in mutt. It works well for me.
- nickysielicki 11y agoI actually use this already. I think my dissatisfaction with mutt + rss2email is more about RSS in general. It amounts to just being a short description of the article and a hyperlink, and at that point I might as well just load these websites in my browser. I need a better article scraper. General solutions that try to detect content, like Firefox's article mode and similar, don't do enough. We need youtube-dl for text.
- Motomorgen 11y agoMaybe a little more heavy handed but I use huginn for exactly that. Read in numerous RSS feeds and digest them into my email box. It does a lot more than that too. https://github.com/cantino/huginn https://github.com/cantino/huginn
- nickysielicki 11y agoWow I can't believe I've never heard of this. This is cool. Thanks for posting it.
- scateu 11y agoAlpine has NNTP support.
- stevekemp 11y agoYou could use rss2email on a cron-job to mail you RSS things - it's not as pretty as a console reader, but it might help?
- SmirkingRevenge 11y agoI used to be a mutt user back in the day, and it was great at the time, especially when unix/linux lacked anything really better, and there were no iphones or android devices. It was/is the best-in-class console based email client, probably still is. I can't but help feeling though these days it just doesn't really gain you anything substantive to bother to learn it, or even continue to use it, and spend the hours it will require to dial in and maintain your configuration. Most gui clients are good enough.. webmail (Gmail and alternatives) are good enough, unless you have some non-negotiable requirement that mandates you have your own self-hosted email servers, I have a hard time believing its not an overall productivity loss to spend time in mutt (or Gnus for emacs, and other such things). If you like to tinker with that kind of thing, and you like making your email client a hobby of sorts, cool. But what do you really gain other than a techno-bauble to tinker with?
- reverend 11y agoIt's about preference and work flow. Myself I use Mutt and configured it extensively to speed up mail processing with macros and short cuts. So Mutt may not give _you_ anything of value, but to others it may be a huge time saving tool. :)
- roel_v 11y ago"and spend the hours it will require to dial in and maintain your configuration." This is my main gripe with mutt. The days where I could futz around with 100 config setting for hours are long behind me. Just having to set up an smtp daemon every time, and having to maintain it, is such a pain in the ass. Probably most tools have moved on by now (I moved away from mutt in 2004 or 2005) but I used mostly postfix and qmail (when I got fed up with one I switched to the other for a few months, etc). Just having to remember the dozens of idiosyncrasies in those was enough of a PITA to make me switch to an integrated graphical mail program. My main method of searching email was grep -R ~/.Maildir . When I think back about that - ugh.
- drauh 11y ago(n)mh is the Unix ideal. Once you are "inside" an app instead of your shell prompt, you are no conforming the Unix ideal.