13 ms·

Mutt 1.7.0 released

105 points by tdurden 10y ago

wahern 10y ago
Am I the only one who wishes Mutt loaded mbox files faster? A couple of years ago I wrote an mbox parser that was several times faster than Mutt's. It really showed because at the time my server was running on a Soekris net6501, my mailbox was a few hundred megabytes, and my habit is to invoke and exit mutt repeatedly rather than using a dedicated terminal window. Since then I've been running my server on a Xeon E3, and it's less bothersome. I investigated patching Mutt to use the parser, but it seemed a little too much trouble for the effort given how many one-liners have accreted in the existing implementation. Using an index would make things more responsive, too, but the faster parser could provide competitive responsiveness into the gigabyte territory while keeping things simple, in both code and on the filesystem. Is this a common enough gripe that it might be accepted and appreciated? My parser used Ragel but I could implement it again in plain C so it didn't have a build-time dependency.
- notaplumber 10y ago
  I'd wager any mbox optimization efforts are put on the back burner in lieu of modern usages, which seem to be in favor using it as a IMAP client only.
  - stevekemp 10y ago
    I'd agree with that. That said there is an obvious solution to slow MBOX folders, which wouldbe to switch to using Maildir-storage, then using the `header_cache` setting(s).
    - notaplumber 10y ago
      I personally don't mind MBOX, it's a simple format and if you archive it regularly and don't let it grow exponentially, it can be nice to work with.
      - jabl 10y ago
        mbox is fine for a read-only (or at least append-only) archive. It's when you start deleting messages, changing flags etc. in the middle that it becomes a pain.
  - just_had_tea 10y ago
    For years i used Mutt as an IMAP client, but that was honestly quite a nightmare. Even back in the day at uni with an über fast internet connection it was still just not responsive enough. The day i switched to using OfflineIMAP and a local Maildir it was as if the blinds had been drawn aside and sunshine streamed into my INBOX :). Having said that, i use mu4e these days, because i've become an Emacs user. With a few tweaks it now scratches my itch very effectively (except of course the HTML-email problem as mentioned elsewhere -- this is especially troublesome at work where they want me to include an HTML-embedded-image-tabled monstrosity with about a page of legalese as a signature).
- quesera 10y ago
  I hate to make any assumptions about your environment, but surely you can abandon mbox for a modern storage format (e.g. Maildir)? I can sympathize with the pain of a slow mbox parser, but even a magical parser can't resolve the fundamental flaws in the format.
- gkya 10y ago
  The common solution is to split your mbox regularly. You can use mairix to search across many mboxes, it creates a new mbox with a certain name that contains the matching mail that you can open with mutt.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- _wmd 10y ago
  Hey, I'm not sure if it's upstreamed yet, but at least the Red Hat fork includes a patch to use unlocked libc IO which more than doubles the mbox parser performance: https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz/commit/0672404fc710b4af58bdd521a2375e7ffa5b3ecf https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz/commit/0672404fc710b4af5... Mutt's parser is woeful, it's a decade or so of hacks, and in some cases it can't even round-trip its own mboxes without corruption
- pilooch 10y ago
  Weird, my mailboxes each contain 10K+ emails and load in a snap.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Is there any particular reason you're using mbox rather than maildir (single-message-per-file)? Mutt offers quite good header/index caching, and there are other tools for improving on that.
hossbeast 10y ago
I'd love to do email in the console, but I have the impression that it just wouldn't work with my corporate email servers
- Sevrene 10y ago
  If it works in other email clients, it should work in Mutt. Personally setting up Mutt was easier than most email clients for me.
- geofft 10y ago
  Exchange's IMAP and SMTP implementations work fine. The only really awkward things I've seen are that IMAP search doesn't quite work and calendar invites don't do the magical thing you want. But it's definitely reasonable to use a text client for most things and pull up OWA for the occasional edge case. Honestly, it's Gmail I've had more trouble with, because labels aren't really folders as the IMAP spec envisioned.
  - dx4100 10y ago
    So, serious question: Why do you use console e-mail?
    - just_had_tea 10y ago
      * Keyboard-based interaction. * Actual macros and extensibility (i use mu4e which isn't strictly a console e-mail client, but it's text-based and allows me to Elisp the crap out of any issue i'm having).
    - __jal 10y ago
      Other reasons I haven't mentioned: Using Mutt is the easiest way I've found to get and (more importantly) keep GPG configured. Yes, people use it; in my case, for interacting with some open source projects. I've played with setting up various graphical clients with it, but I don't use GPG every day, and it somehow always manages to break in some annoying way. Configuring that with Mutt is loosely coupled enough that it just keeps working. And second, once you're comfortable with your config, triaging huge amounts of mail is blazingly fast. You might not notice the delay that comes from the occasionally slow GUI reactions, intentionally slow animations, dialogs, the mouse, etc. But compared to the instant reaction to single character commands, there's no contest, and if you're catching up on an enormous amount of mail for some reason, it really makes a difference. And if you ever have to deal with automated mail systems that succumb to sudden-onset logorrhea in your direction, regular expressions for tagging mail for group operations are a godsend.
stevekemp 10y ago
If you like console-based mail-clients you might want to checkout my own project: https://github.com/lumail/lumail2/ https://github.com/lumail/lumail2/ This is directly inspired by mutt, but uses a real scripting language (lua) for most of the operations. It allows you bind keys to lua-functions and so on.
- newsat13 10y ago
  Oh wow, this is looking really good! What mailboxes do you support?
  - stevekemp 10y ago
    Only (local) Maildir and (slow) IMAP at the moment. I want to improve the IMAP, but it's always a low-priority.
- shakna 10y ago
  First, this looks really cool. Second, and sorry if I missed it just glancing over the project, is there a way to tweak the views, like with ```message```? (Wondering if I can insert pandoc or the like to change how it displays in the terminal)
  - stevekemp 10y ago
    Might be best to file a bug-report if you have questions/feature-requests. But see HACKING.md. In brief the display of mode X comes from the output of the function "X_view()". So you can change the rendered text there by updating that function. So for changing the message-displayed you'll want to tweak `message_view(msg)`, and can add rendering there. Hope that helps.
janvdberg 10y ago
Complete changelog: http://www.mutt.org/doc/UPDATING http://www.mutt.org/doc/UPDATING "Please watch for airborne bovine."
apatters 10y ago
I love the snappiness and power of mutt but when I tried to switch to it as my full-time mail client it didn't end up being an improvement. Not really due to any fault of mutt's but because I disagree with the common POV that HTML email is useless/the scourge of the Internet/etc. What really ended up being the dealbreaker was that the viewing and authoring experience for moderately marked up text was poor. Specifically: Quoting, bulleted lists, inline attachments, and maybe a few other basic formatting tricks. This kind of stuff doesn't end up rendering well when I view the mail in a terminal-based browser like w3m, and I didn't even try authoring (am I going to hand-code the HTML for every email I write?). I wish we had something like Markdown for email--to me that would be the sweet spot between the mess HTML email has become, and plain text which sometimes does lack in its ability to communicate information. Beyond that I would love any advice on how to use a terminal-based mail client but still be able to author and view some kind of useful representation of things like lists and quotes. Maybe with just the right configuration this can be done...
- erikb 10y ago
  I'm not a mutt user, but I believe in the power of text. Look at your comment. It's a lot of text, and zero formatting. But still it's powerful at achieving what you want to achieve. I really don't see why you need that kind of html stuff or markdown, or inline attachments, etc.
  - yoplait_ 10y ago
    yeah to hell with those latex documents and word processors, behold the .txt file!
    - jsrjenkins 10y ago
      But latex and word are usually for printing a document. For something that will later be printed, you would want some sort of control over the actual look as the appearance is a large part of what is being communicated. Printing is also much more expensive than sending electrons so you would expect a much more developed medium for this. I have never printed an email in my life. The appearance of the text is not essential to what is being communicated. Here a certain consistency is more important that variety - or rather the variety comes through the vocabulary and written expressions, not the font shape. The same could be said for IM clients or IRC. Except for a few minor tweaks such as html links there is no real need for text formatting in these mediums, and very few clients even make the effort to do this.
carlesfe 10y ago
On the topic of console email clients, why does Mutt receive so much love and Alpine doesn't? I used Pine for many years in college and I really liked its menu interface and its ability to read news. I used Mutt some years ago and found it too complex for the task. Maybe it's becaused I was used to Pine. Has somebody used both recently and can elaborate a bit? Thanks!
- exDM69 10y ago
  May be due to Mutt's more Vi-like user interface. Vimmers use Mutt and Emacs guys use emacs-based mail user agents. There aren't too many people preferring terminal mail apps left for Alpine.
  - bshimmin 10y ago
    Just to be contrary, I happily used emacs and Mutt together for about a decade. (I wanted to start using Mutt again earlier this year, but so far the labour of love involved in cobbling a good .muttrc together - without just copying bits and pieces from other people's - has proved too much like hard work, and I have enough of that as it is.)
  - Steltek 10y ago
    I'm a brain damaged user. I switched from Vim to Emacs a few years ago but kept Mutt. But I also tend to (ab)use Emacs like it's Vim. No emacsclient but I still pop in and out of it quickly. .emacs has a lot of lazy loading to keep startup snappy.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    There are actually no emacs mail clients that I could get to work :-(. So I used mutt for a while. Nowadays, I answer all my email on my phone, when I can bother to sort through the deluge of spam at all.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  I haven't used Alpine, but did use Pine for a while (also elm, mail, whatever the standard VMS client was, and some others). I quit using Pine for the usual reason: it was nonfree and not bundled. My first alternative was Netscape Mail (actually fairly decent, threaded, which helped). Then got into mutt. Mutt is just ... more power-user than Pine, I guess. The ability to tag and pipe messages or headers into shell tools is hugely useful. Wnat to get a summary of messages by sender, subject, or parse bodies on the fly to give some simple stats or graphics? That's doable as a shell one-liner from mutt. (MH is another option and probably even more amenable to scripting tricks -- see Larry Peeks book on the topic.)
alxprc 10y ago
This release is particularly interesting because it includes the sidebar patch, which has existed in various forms for about 10 years [1]. Mutt has generally been quite conservative in accepting patches. NeoMutt [2] is a project hoping to kick-start development on the Mutt project, by being much more willing to accept contributor patches. The repository [3] is becoming more and more active; help is always greatly appreciated! [1]: http://www.lunar-linux.org/mutt-sidebar/ http://www.lunar-linux.org/mutt-sidebar/ [2]: http://www.neomutt.org/ http://www.neomutt.org/ [3]: https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt
znpy 10y ago
I used to use mutt, but I switched to Thunderbird because I now have to track more than one mail account and like having a clear overview of all my accounts. I al perfectly aware of the fact that mutt can handle more than one mail account: I used to change settings with chdir hooks and stuff like, but honestly, it's quite an overkill.
adrianratnapala 10y ago
Does this new release include a sane concept of multiple accounts? Or are we still stuck with hook voodoo?
jvehent 10y ago
Many people try to switch to Mutt thinking it will be like using gmail but in the terminal. It is not. Mutt is a productivity tool, like vim and emacs, but for email instead of code. You need to invest a lot of time into learning it, refining your configuration, and getting comfortable with its interface. It will originally be as frustrating as giving emacs to a notepad user, but eventually pays off the learning cost in productivity. Some examples of commands I use all the time: * shift+D deletes an entire thread. Very useful to delete entire github discussions in one command. * `t` flags a message, then `;+s` moves the entire flag to another folder * custom macros. For example, I use `short+C` to move the message under the cursor to folder `foo`. I have 5/6 similar macros for the folders I use most. GnuPG integration is also a big help (I use it constantly). I'm use many other MUA offer similar shortcuts and configurability, but Mutt is the fastest and most flexible by far. The one thing that I haven't found a good solution for is full text search across multiple folders. I still rely on gmail for that.
- geofft 10y ago
  > shift+D deletes an entire thread. Very useful to delete entire github discussions in one command. If you enable keyboard shortcuts from Gmail's settings screen, "e" archives the entire thread and moves you back to the inbox. "m" will additionally mute the thread so new replies don't show up in the inbox. You can also use "{" or "}" to archive and move to the next or previous thread, instead of back to the inbox. > `t` flags a message, then `;+s` moves the entire flag to another folder "x" selects the current thread and moves you back to the inbox. Then "v" brings up the menu for typing which folder to move all selected conversations into. > custom macros. For example, I use `short+C` to move the message under the cursor to folder `foo`. I have 5/6 similar macros for the folders I use most. "vfoo" will do that. Gmail is also a productivity tool, and you should also invest time into learning it and getting comfortable with its interface.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Mutt is a productivity tool that's learned (or at least practiced) the wisdom that you don't fuck with a productivity tool's UI/UX gratuitously. Google ... hasn't.
epse 10y ago
And it is already in Debian Testing! Dear maintainer, thank you!
tanderson92 10y ago
One problem I have had with mutt and I don't see it fixed in the current issue relates to GPG support. It appears that when I send an encrypted e-mail, mutt does the obvious thing and saves the encrypted e-mail in my sent folder. But that's encrypted /to the receiver/, not to me. Hasn't this bothered enough people for mutt to fix it, so that GPG-encrypted e-mails are encrypted-to-self when copied to Sent?
- travisb 10y ago
  There are at least three ways to solve your problem: 1. Use fcc_clear=yes to not encrypt the copy in your sent folder 2. Use GPG's encrypt-to in your GPG configuration: https://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/r1261.html https://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/r1261.html 3. Add --encrypt-to to the GPG commands mutt uses: https://dev.mutt.org/trac/wiki/MuttGuide/UseGPG#TheCodeSourcerymethodofMuttsetupandexplanation https://dev.mutt.org/trac/wiki/MuttGuide/UseGPG#TheCodeSourc...
  - tanderson92 10y ago
    Thank you for (2). (1) is not an option for obvious reasons, but I had been using (3) and it was not working as claimed. I'll try (2).
dredmorbius 10y ago
I haven't seen mentioned: * Is assigning specific tags to messages (or labels) supported? What's the interface like? * Any fast searching/indexing options? * Anything, generally, for improved behavior with Gmail?

105 points by tdurden 10y ago

Am I the only one who wishes Mutt loaded mbox files faster? A couple of years ago I wrote an mbox parser that was several times faster than Mutt's. It really showed because at the time my server was running on a Soekris net6501, my mailbox was a few hundred megabytes, and my habit is to invoke and exit mutt repeatedly rather than using a dedicated terminal window. Since then I've been running my server on a Xeon E3, and it's less bothersome. I investigated patching Mutt to use the parser, but it seemed a little too much trouble for the effort given how many one-liners have accreted in the existing implementation. Using an index would make things more responsive, too, but the faster parser could provide competitive responsiveness into the gigabyte territory while keeping things simple, in both code and on the filesystem. Is this a common enough gripe that it might be accepted and appreciated? My parser used Ragel but I could implement it again in plain C so it didn't have a build-time dependency.

notaplumber 10y ago
I'd wager any mbox optimization efforts are put on the back burner in lieu of modern usages, which seem to be in favor using it as a IMAP client only.
- stevekemp 10y ago
  I'd agree with that. That said there is an obvious solution to slow MBOX folders, which wouldbe to switch to using Maildir-storage, then using the `header_cache` setting(s).
  - notaplumber 10y ago
    I personally don't mind MBOX, it's a simple format and if you archive it regularly and don't let it grow exponentially, it can be nice to work with.
    - jabl 10y ago
      mbox is fine for a read-only (or at least append-only) archive. It's when you start deleting messages, changing flags etc. in the middle that it becomes a pain.
- just_had_tea 10y ago
  For years i used Mutt as an IMAP client, but that was honestly quite a nightmare. Even back in the day at uni with an über fast internet connection it was still just not responsive enough. The day i switched to using OfflineIMAP and a local Maildir it was as if the blinds had been drawn aside and sunshine streamed into my INBOX :). Having said that, i use mu4e these days, because i've become an Emacs user. With a few tweaks it now scratches my itch very effectively (except of course the HTML-email problem as mentioned elsewhere -- this is especially troublesome at work where they want me to include an HTML-embedded-image-tabled monstrosity with about a page of legalese as a signature).
quesera 10y ago
I hate to make any assumptions about your environment, but surely you can abandon mbox for a modern storage format (e.g. Maildir)? I can sympathize with the pain of a slow mbox parser, but even a magical parser can't resolve the fundamental flaws in the format.
gkya 10y ago
The common solution is to split your mbox regularly. You can use mairix to search across many mboxes, it creates a new mbox with a certain name that contains the matching mail that you can open with mutt.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
_wmd 10y ago
Hey, I'm not sure if it's upstreamed yet, but at least the Red Hat fork includes a patch to use unlocked libc IO which more than doubles the mbox parser performance: https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz/commit/0672404fc710b4af58bdd521a2375e7ffa5b3ecf https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz/commit/0672404fc710b4af5... Mutt's parser is woeful, it's a decade or so of hacks, and in some cases it can't even round-trip its own mboxes without corruption
pilooch 10y ago
Weird, my mailboxes each contain 10K+ emails and load in a snap.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Is there any particular reason you're using mbox rather than maildir (single-message-per-file)? Mutt offers quite good header/index caching, and there are other tools for improving on that.

hossbeast 10y ago

I'd love to do email in the console, but I have the impression that it just wouldn't work with my corporate email servers

Sevrene 10y ago
If it works in other email clients, it should work in Mutt. Personally setting up Mutt was easier than most email clients for me.
geofft 10y ago
Exchange's IMAP and SMTP implementations work fine. The only really awkward things I've seen are that IMAP search doesn't quite work and calendar invites don't do the magical thing you want. But it's definitely reasonable to use a text client for most things and pull up OWA for the occasional edge case. Honestly, it's Gmail I've had more trouble with, because labels aren't really folders as the IMAP spec envisioned.
- dx4100 10y ago
  So, serious question: Why do you use console e-mail?
  - just_had_tea 10y ago
    * Keyboard-based interaction. * Actual macros and extensibility (i use mu4e which isn't strictly a console e-mail client, but it's text-based and allows me to Elisp the crap out of any issue i'm having).
  - __jal 10y ago
    Other reasons I haven't mentioned: Using Mutt is the easiest way I've found to get and (more importantly) keep GPG configured. Yes, people use it; in my case, for interacting with some open source projects. I've played with setting up various graphical clients with it, but I don't use GPG every day, and it somehow always manages to break in some annoying way. Configuring that with Mutt is loosely coupled enough that it just keeps working. And second, once you're comfortable with your config, triaging huge amounts of mail is blazingly fast. You might not notice the delay that comes from the occasionally slow GUI reactions, intentionally slow animations, dialogs, the mouse, etc. But compared to the instant reaction to single character commands, there's no contest, and if you're catching up on an enormous amount of mail for some reason, it really makes a difference. And if you ever have to deal with automated mail systems that succumb to sudden-onset logorrhea in your direction, regular expressions for tagging mail for group operations are a godsend.

stevekemp 10y ago

If you like console-based mail-clients you might want to checkout my own project: https://github.com/lumail/lumail2/ https://github.com/lumail/lumail2/ This is directly inspired by mutt, but uses a real scripting language (lua) for most of the operations. It allows you bind keys to lua-functions and so on.

newsat13 10y ago
Oh wow, this is looking really good! What mailboxes do you support?
- stevekemp 10y ago
  Only (local) Maildir and (slow) IMAP at the moment. I want to improve the IMAP, but it's always a low-priority.
shakna 10y ago
First, this looks really cool. Second, and sorry if I missed it just glancing over the project, is there a way to tweak the views, like with ```message```? (Wondering if I can insert pandoc or the like to change how it displays in the terminal)
- stevekemp 10y ago
  Might be best to file a bug-report if you have questions/feature-requests. But see HACKING.md. In brief the display of mode X comes from the output of the function "X_view()". So you can change the rendered text there by updating that function. So for changing the message-displayed you'll want to tweak `message_view(msg)`, and can add rendering there. Hope that helps.

janvdberg 10y ago

Complete changelog: http://www.mutt.org/doc/UPDATING http://www.mutt.org/doc/UPDATING "Please watch for airborne bovine."

apatters 10y ago

I love the snappiness and power of mutt but when I tried to switch to it as my full-time mail client it didn't end up being an improvement. Not really due to any fault of mutt's but because I disagree with the common POV that HTML email is useless/the scourge of the Internet/etc. What really ended up being the dealbreaker was that the viewing and authoring experience for moderately marked up text was poor. Specifically: Quoting, bulleted lists, inline attachments, and maybe a few other basic formatting tricks. This kind of stuff doesn't end up rendering well when I view the mail in a terminal-based browser like w3m, and I didn't even try authoring (am I going to hand-code the HTML for every email I write?). I wish we had something like Markdown for email--to me that would be the sweet spot between the mess HTML email has become, and plain text which sometimes does lack in its ability to communicate information. Beyond that I would love any advice on how to use a terminal-based mail client but still be able to author and view some kind of useful representation of things like lists and quotes. Maybe with just the right configuration this can be done...

erikb 10y ago
I'm not a mutt user, but I believe in the power of text. Look at your comment. It's a lot of text, and zero formatting. But still it's powerful at achieving what you want to achieve. I really don't see why you need that kind of html stuff or markdown, or inline attachments, etc.
- yoplait_ 10y ago
  yeah to hell with those latex documents and word processors, behold the .txt file!
  - jsrjenkins 10y ago
    But latex and word are usually for printing a document. For something that will later be printed, you would want some sort of control over the actual look as the appearance is a large part of what is being communicated. Printing is also much more expensive than sending electrons so you would expect a much more developed medium for this. I have never printed an email in my life. The appearance of the text is not essential to what is being communicated. Here a certain consistency is more important that variety - or rather the variety comes through the vocabulary and written expressions, not the font shape. The same could be said for IM clients or IRC. Except for a few minor tweaks such as html links there is no real need for text formatting in these mediums, and very few clients even make the effort to do this.

carlesfe 10y ago

On the topic of console email clients, why does Mutt receive so much love and Alpine doesn't? I used Pine for many years in college and I really liked its menu interface and its ability to read news. I used Mutt some years ago and found it too complex for the task. Maybe it's becaused I was used to Pine. Has somebody used both recently and can elaborate a bit? Thanks!

exDM69 10y ago
May be due to Mutt's more Vi-like user interface. Vimmers use Mutt and Emacs guys use emacs-based mail user agents. There aren't too many people preferring terminal mail apps left for Alpine.
- bshimmin 10y ago
  Just to be contrary, I happily used emacs and Mutt together for about a decade. (I wanted to start using Mutt again earlier this year, but so far the labour of love involved in cobbling a good .muttrc together - without just copying bits and pieces from other people's - has proved too much like hard work, and I have enough of that as it is.)
- Steltek 10y ago
  I'm a brain damaged user. I switched from Vim to Emacs a few years ago but kept Mutt. But I also tend to (ab)use Emacs like it's Vim. No emacsclient but I still pop in and out of it quickly. .emacs has a lot of lazy loading to keep startup snappy.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  There are actually no emacs mail clients that I could get to work :-(. So I used mutt for a while. Nowadays, I answer all my email on my phone, when I can bother to sort through the deluge of spam at all.
dredmorbius 10y ago
I haven't used Alpine, but did use Pine for a while (also elm, mail, whatever the standard VMS client was, and some others). I quit using Pine for the usual reason: it was nonfree and not bundled. My first alternative was Netscape Mail (actually fairly decent, threaded, which helped). Then got into mutt. Mutt is just ... more power-user than Pine, I guess. The ability to tag and pipe messages or headers into shell tools is hugely useful. Wnat to get a summary of messages by sender, subject, or parse bodies on the fly to give some simple stats or graphics? That's doable as a shell one-liner from mutt. (MH is another option and probably even more amenable to scripting tricks -- see Larry Peeks book on the topic.)

alxprc 10y ago

This release is particularly interesting because it includes the sidebar patch, which has existed in various forms for about 10 years [1]. Mutt has generally been quite conservative in accepting patches. NeoMutt [2] is a project hoping to kick-start development on the Mutt project, by being much more willing to accept contributor patches. The repository [3] is becoming more and more active; help is always greatly appreciated! [1]: http://www.lunar-linux.org/mutt-sidebar/ http://www.lunar-linux.org/mutt-sidebar/ [2]: http://www.neomutt.org/ http://www.neomutt.org/ [3]: https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt

znpy 10y ago

I used to use mutt, but I switched to Thunderbird because I now have to track more than one mail account and like having a clear overview of all my accounts. I al perfectly aware of the fact that mutt can handle more than one mail account: I used to change settings with chdir hooks and stuff like, but honestly, it's quite an overkill.

adrianratnapala 10y ago

Does this new release include a sane concept of multiple accounts? Or are we still stuck with hook voodoo?

jvehent 10y ago

Many people try to switch to Mutt thinking it will be like using gmail but in the terminal. It is not. Mutt is a productivity tool, like vim and emacs, but for email instead of code. You need to invest a lot of time into learning it, refining your configuration, and getting comfortable with its interface. It will originally be as frustrating as giving emacs to a notepad user, but eventually pays off the learning cost in productivity. Some examples of commands I use all the time: * shift+D deletes an entire thread. Very useful to delete entire github discussions in one command. * `t` flags a message, then `;+s` moves the entire flag to another folder * custom macros. For example, I use `short+C` to move the message under the cursor to folder `foo`. I have 5/6 similar macros for the folders I use most. GnuPG integration is also a big help (I use it constantly). I'm use many other MUA offer similar shortcuts and configurability, but Mutt is the fastest and most flexible by far. The one thing that I haven't found a good solution for is full text search across multiple folders. I still rely on gmail for that.

geofft 10y ago
> shift+D deletes an entire thread. Very useful to delete entire github discussions in one command. If you enable keyboard shortcuts from Gmail's settings screen, "e" archives the entire thread and moves you back to the inbox. "m" will additionally mute the thread so new replies don't show up in the inbox. You can also use "{" or "}" to archive and move to the next or previous thread, instead of back to the inbox. > `t` flags a message, then `;+s` moves the entire flag to another folder "x" selects the current thread and moves you back to the inbox. Then "v" brings up the menu for typing which folder to move all selected conversations into. > custom macros. For example, I use `short+C` to move the message under the cursor to folder `foo`. I have 5/6 similar macros for the folders I use most. "vfoo" will do that. Gmail is also a productivity tool, and you should also invest time into learning it and getting comfortable with its interface.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Mutt is a productivity tool that's learned (or at least practiced) the wisdom that you don't fuck with a productivity tool's UI/UX gratuitously. Google ... hasn't.

epse 10y ago

And it is already in Debian Testing! Dear maintainer, thank you!

tanderson92 10y ago

One problem I have had with mutt and I don't see it fixed in the current issue relates to GPG support. It appears that when I send an encrypted e-mail, mutt does the obvious thing and saves the encrypted e-mail in my sent folder. But that's encrypted /to the receiver/, not to me. Hasn't this bothered enough people for mutt to fix it, so that GPG-encrypted e-mails are encrypted-to-self when copied to Sent?

travisb 10y ago
There are at least three ways to solve your problem: 1. Use fcc_clear=yes to not encrypt the copy in your sent folder 2. Use GPG's encrypt-to in your GPG configuration: https://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/r1261.html https://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/r1261.html 3. Add --encrypt-to to the GPG commands mutt uses: https://dev.mutt.org/trac/wiki/MuttGuide/UseGPG#TheCodeSourcerymethodofMuttsetupandexplanation https://dev.mutt.org/trac/wiki/MuttGuide/UseGPG#TheCodeSourc...
- tanderson92 10y ago
  Thank you for (2). (1) is not an option for obvious reasons, but I had been using (3) and it was not working as claimed. I'll try (2).

dredmorbius 10y ago

I haven't seen mentioned: * Is assigning specific tags to messages (or labels) supported? What's the interface like? * Any fast searching/indexing options? * Anything, generally, for improved behavior with Gmail?