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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 an

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.
geniium 10y ago
Have been thinking about markdown email support as well. That would solve many of our problems!
john2x 10y ago
I've switched to using Emacs (with mu4e + offlineimap). Composing pretty emails using Orgmode is great. It's even possible to render code snippets with code highlighting taken from your current theme. Attachments handling is pretty great as well. My only problem is rendering of HTML emails is not good. It tries its best, but most of the time it doesn't work (about 50/50 from my experience).
- cm3 10y ago
  Have you tried an Emacs with eww which relies on libxml2 for HTML parsing?
- nextos 10y ago
  Have you tried isync (mbsync), instead of offlineimap? I found offlineimap slow and crashy, and switched to isync.
  - john2x 10y ago
    Yes, offlineimap crashes every few hours. Not a big deal for me (I don't get a lot of emails), but it is annoying. I'll give mbsync a shot.
- djcb 10y ago
  (mu4e author here) Mu4e has a few different options for displaying rich-text messages. In recent emacsen, it defaults to a shr/eww based display; it's not perfect, but it reduces the set of problem cases. For those, there are the view-in-browser action, and with (as of yet unreleased) emacs-25 you can use a webkit-based display embedded in emacs. With those, I'm able to view just about any message; even the ones I get from airlines etc., which tend to be html-only. Anyway - to get back to the top-level subject: congratulations to mutt, which is a great e-mail client, and a big influence on mu/mu4e.
contingencies 10y ago
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. I don't use mutt but IIRC a basic feature of both mutt and similar (pine + variants, etc.) is allowing you to define your own external editor. Therefore, there's nothing to stop you adding a wrapping pipeline to that so that, for example, first you edit normally in your preferred editor, and second an established piece of code or basic series of regex replaces your markdown with whatever you actually want. Optionally, the reverse runs before editing. This should not take longer than a few hours on the outside to get running comfortably.
- apatters 10y ago
  I can't believe I never thought of this! Brilliant idea. Now just to solve the viewing problem...
  - contingencies 10y ago
    The reverse should work for simple HTML. For complex HTML to plain text try https://www.google.com/search?q=lynx+convert+html+text https://www.google.com/search?q=lynx+convert+html+text .. most text browsers can do a reasonable job of it.
    - Steltek 10y ago
      Using lynx (or elinks, in my case) to view HTML email in mutt is the historical solution. I think the desire here is for a reversible transformation. E.g. I can receive an HTML email, view it as Markdown, reply using Markdown, and then send an HTML email in reply. Unfortunately, I think foreign email clients would mangle the HTML just enough to stop this from working. You'd have to start implementing a tag soup type parser to coax incoming mail into something intelligible.
      - dredmorbius 10y ago
        We're almost at that stage with HTML already. I'm thinking that a multi-pass parser: 1. Is this sane HTML5 markup? I'll eat that. 2. Is this a borked-but-manageable variant? Strip the cruft. 3. Is this Beyond All Hope? Just dump it as ASCII. It'll be blockquoted in reply. HTML is no longer a peresistent, stable, or universal interchange format.
xorcist 10y ago
Go ahead and write Markdown. Every one of your recipients will understand, as Markdown is essentially taken from how people write plain text email (> for block quotes, * for bulleted lists, _ for emphasis etc.). I've seen that some graphical clients seem to interpret these characters. It's common for block quotes to be colorized and foldable, for example. (But what do I know? I'm an old fart in email matters.)
anoother 10y ago
I use Markdown Here for this - - compose in Markdown, click a button, get nice html-formatted email. One annoyance is not being able to get back the original markdown. But a mutt workflow could easily deal with this.
deleted 10y ago
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deleted 10y ago
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klancaster 10y ago
If you are on a Mac, try https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/. I moved to it from Mutt. It uses Markdown to write emails, has fantastic search capabilities, etc.
ijelenic 10y ago
Im using markdown for writing email, and then on "send-message" I have macro that converts to html (pandoc), and sends an e-mail. I agree with you, html mails can be usefull and people like them more than plain text (specially marketing,sales, etc). I believe I have sweet spot with mutt, lot of custom configs being very productive, but not ignoring html . Sidenote, I use xombrero to view html mails if they are complex (inline images etc) - it is very fast and always shows mails correctly

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.

geniium 10y ago

Have been thinking about markdown email support as well. That would solve many of our problems!

john2x 10y ago

I've switched to using Emacs (with mu4e + offlineimap). Composing pretty emails using Orgmode is great. It's even possible to render code snippets with code highlighting taken from your current theme. Attachments handling is pretty great as well. My only problem is rendering of HTML emails is not good. It tries its best, but most of the time it doesn't work (about 50/50 from my experience).

cm3 10y ago
Have you tried an Emacs with eww which relies on libxml2 for HTML parsing?
nextos 10y ago
Have you tried isync (mbsync), instead of offlineimap? I found offlineimap slow and crashy, and switched to isync.
- john2x 10y ago
  Yes, offlineimap crashes every few hours. Not a big deal for me (I don't get a lot of emails), but it is annoying. I'll give mbsync a shot.
djcb 10y ago
(mu4e author here) Mu4e has a few different options for displaying rich-text messages. In recent emacsen, it defaults to a shr/eww based display; it's not perfect, but it reduces the set of problem cases. For those, there are the view-in-browser action, and with (as of yet unreleased) emacs-25 you can use a webkit-based display embedded in emacs. With those, I'm able to view just about any message; even the ones I get from airlines etc., which tend to be html-only. Anyway - to get back to the top-level subject: congratulations to mutt, which is a great e-mail client, and a big influence on mu/mu4e.

contingencies 10y ago

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. I don't use mutt but IIRC a basic feature of both mutt and similar (pine + variants, etc.) is allowing you to define your own external editor. Therefore, there's nothing to stop you adding a wrapping pipeline to that so that, for example, first you edit normally in your preferred editor, and second an established piece of code or basic series of regex replaces your markdown with whatever you actually want. Optionally, the reverse runs before editing. This should not take longer than a few hours on the outside to get running comfortably.

apatters 10y ago
I can't believe I never thought of this! Brilliant idea. Now just to solve the viewing problem...
- contingencies 10y ago
  The reverse should work for simple HTML. For complex HTML to plain text try https://www.google.com/search?q=lynx+convert+html+text https://www.google.com/search?q=lynx+convert+html+text .. most text browsers can do a reasonable job of it.
  - Steltek 10y ago
    Using lynx (or elinks, in my case) to view HTML email in mutt is the historical solution. I think the desire here is for a reversible transformation. E.g. I can receive an HTML email, view it as Markdown, reply using Markdown, and then send an HTML email in reply. Unfortunately, I think foreign email clients would mangle the HTML just enough to stop this from working. You'd have to start implementing a tag soup type parser to coax incoming mail into something intelligible.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      We're almost at that stage with HTML already. I'm thinking that a multi-pass parser: 1. Is this sane HTML5 markup? I'll eat that. 2. Is this a borked-but-manageable variant? Strip the cruft. 3. Is this Beyond All Hope? Just dump it as ASCII. It'll be blockquoted in reply. HTML is no longer a peresistent, stable, or universal interchange format.

xorcist 10y ago

Go ahead and write Markdown. Every one of your recipients will understand, as Markdown is essentially taken from how people write plain text email (> for block quotes, * for bulleted lists, _ for emphasis etc.). I've seen that some graphical clients seem to interpret these characters. It's common for block quotes to be colorized and foldable, for example. (But what do I know? I'm an old fart in email matters.)

anoother 10y ago

I use Markdown Here for this - - compose in Markdown, click a button, get nice html-formatted email. One annoyance is not being able to get back the original markdown. But a mutt workflow could easily deal with this.

deleted 10y ago

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deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

klancaster 10y ago

If you are on a Mac, try https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/. I moved to it from Mutt. It uses Markdown to write emails, has fantastic search capabilities, etc.

ijelenic 10y ago

Im using markdown for writing email, and then on "send-message" I have macro that converts to html (pandoc), and sends an e-mail. I agree with you, html mails can be usefull and people like them more than plain text (specially marketing,sales, etc). I believe I have sweet spot with mutt, lot of custom configs being very productive, but not ignoring html . Sidenote, I use xombrero to view html mails if they are complex (inline images etc) - it is very fast and always shows mails correctly