9 ms·

Using Gmail with Mutt

145 points by wheresvic1 10y ago

wyclif 10y ago
Is it possible to use mutt and Gmail without enabling lesssecureapps? I know this post deals with some of those issues (gpg keys and whatnot), and Google strongly recommends IMAP/SMTP protocol users switch to OAuth 2.0, etc.
- bartbes 10y ago
  I was honestly surprised to see all this gpg setup, yet no mention of application-specific passwords. I've been using email clients with what google now calls an "App password" for years.
  - fishywang 10y ago
    "application-specific passwords" are not actually restricted to a single application. You can restrict the scope (only has access to your emails, for example), but any application could use this password to access your emails.
    - bartbes 10y ago
      Sure, but you can revoke them without changing your password or revoking other app passwords, making it much easier to recover if they do leak.
- Elv13 10y ago
  Yes, I do it, but honestly, it is a pain. I didn't look too hard, but at first glance it seems there is no way to get a persistent token to work. Everytime you don't renew your token after 1800 seconds, you have to open the google developer web page and get a new one.
brandur 10y ago
I've been using Mutt with Gmail for years to great effect, and would very much recommend the set up. The one caveat that I should point out (because it's not mentioned in the article) is that you will probably never be fully rid of official Gmail clients. There is still no good mechanism to use some features with Mutt like thread muting, and these are essential to effective email these days. It's also often more convenient to read certain types of email (e.g. messages that are heavy in multimedia) from a client that supports graphics. My usual habit is to read email in the web client or on mobile, and respond to or compose mail from within Mutt.
- sigil 10y ago
  > There is still no good mechanism to use some features with Mutt like thread muting. I use `collapse-thread` (Esc-v) on long threads I don't care about, but you're right this is less than ideal. New messages in the thread uncollapse it again, and there's no way to persist the collapsed state, so switching mailboxes or restarting mutt loses it.
Gxorgxo 10y ago
I love to use the terminal—I'm a Vim and tmux user—but I was never really able to switch to Mutt. I often receive emails with attached images or HTML code. Maybe some Mutt user can share with me some of the reasons why they like it so much?
- h43z 10y ago
  Mutt makes writing/reading/searching/managing email just really fast. Mutt also allows to pass the message body to an external program. This helps for formatting HTML mails. This is a snippet from my .mailcap file which renders HTML mail through lynx. text/html; lynx -dump -force_html %s; needsterminal; copiousoutput
  - baldfat 10y ago
    I output my mutt to w3m with using feh for images. Not always the right tool for the job but it is an easy way to find out if it is.
- setrofim_ 10y ago
  - Seamlessly use Vim to write and edit email - Can easily deal with large volumes of email -- quickly tab through unread messages - Highlights text from previous emails in a thread, making it easy to see who replied to what - You can also set up highlighting for diffs, making it easy to review attached patches and change snippets - Powerful search via external indexers (mu, notmuch) - Keyboard navigation for everything (if you're using vim and tmux, then you're already spending most of your time with your hands on the keyboard, and having to fish for the mouse just to quicky reply to an email starts to feel really slow). For handling HTML email, I use a two-pronged approach: for most email I use links browser to automatically render HTML as ASCII so I can view it directly in mutt; for email that has images or otherwise cannot be rendered sensibly with links, I have mapped a key to open it in a graphical browser (dwb for fast launching or Firefox+vimperator if I need to deal with login forms, etc). EDIT: formatting
- rsync 10y ago
  I am a 20+ year (al)pine user (without gmail - I host my own mail server) and I have a fairly decent attachment/images/links setup ... First, I use ripmime to dump every single attachment to a folder with dated naming - and so if there is an email in pine with an attachment I want to view, I just web browse a simple apache directory listing and click it. It's not sexy, but it's fast and efficient. Second, I have a terminal PDF reader installed on my system and defined in alpine as a helper app for pdf files. So I cannot read word or excel right in alpine but I can read PDF docs. So that's nice and slick. Finally, I never actually click links in alpine, but I defined lynx as a web viewer anyway because that allows me to get the very simple "do you want to view this http link ?" prompt from alpine ... which I always say NO to, but not until I have copied the full URL which they display for me. Then I just open it in a browser. Fairly happy with this setup.
jrcii 10y ago
I've got Mutt going with Gmail along the lines of Steve Losh's advice http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/ http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/ It works great. Very fast, and it's nice to have a local backup of my email.
- enzolovesbacon 10y ago
  +1 I still haven't found any setup that beats it.
- cbracken 10y ago
  Agreed, by far the best guide I've found. My setup, based on that guide + some tweaks is at https://github.com/cbracken/mutt https://github.com/cbracken/mutt for anyone who might find another sample useful.
- wheresvic1 10y ago
  Yes, I was looking into the whole offline sync setup but I am a big fan of keeping a clean inbox so I just went with the current setup. Also, one advantage of this is that changes are real-time which means that if I check the gmail app on my phone messages are correctly moved, marked as read etc.
nabucodonosor 10y ago
Like the post. What I did differently is to use fdm to fetch emails and store them locally. I've been using Mutt with Gmail for many years. The features I like most are: - regex search - faster actions (like batch delete, mark as read) using tag - can use my editor to compose. I use emacsclient -nw and it's so easy to copy things from shared buffer. - very easy to customize, for example, I want to see the timestamp as local time regardless of the sender's timezone, I wrote a smile Go program to do that https://github.com/wujiang/localize_mutt; https://github.com/wujiang/localize_mutt; I also run a cronjob to archive old emails.
lighttower 10y ago
google-Calendar as a widget on my linux (mate) desktop. Aside from [1] does anyone have a working setup? [1] https://www.linux.com/learn/tricks-using-desktop-integrated-calendars https://www.linux.com/learn/tricks-using-desktop-integrated-...
jacobsenscott 10y ago
mutt + offlineimap + gmail is fantastic. When I need to use their web interface it is painful. mu gives you almost instant search, but I almost never need to search email so I don't have that dialed in.
- ninjin 10y ago
  I use a similar set-up, but I had a really bad time making offlineimap sync work. In the end I switched to isync which was easier to configure. It has fewer features, but it has worked out great for me with `Flatten .` turned on in the configuration file.
  - jacobsenscott 10y ago
    Yeah. Offlineimap was a bear to get working right. I've heard good things about isync, but I don't really want to touch the house of cards now that it is all working.
daily-q 10y ago
Anyone here coming from nmh, but prefer to use Mutt? I was wondering if Mutt is worth the switch since some things in nmh seem hard to keep up to snuff with the ever-changing www.
- dllthomas 10y ago
  I much prefer nmh.
Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
Plug for the mutt replacement I'm working on: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/aerc https://github.com/SirCmpwn/aerc
- bo1024 10y ago
  Can you say what about mutt you dislike or want to improve?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
    Mutt doesn't do networking well. It was build to deal with Maildir and mbox on a local disk, not IMAP over the network. aerc is designed to just support IMAP, and it does networking on a second thread so issues there don't lock up the UI. aerc also supports multiple accounts. It also has (imo) better configuration and commands.
    - luxpir 10y ago
      Can confirm. Long-term mutt-er who frequently switches between wired and wireless networks. I basically just ctrl+z any frozen mutt instance and start over. 'fg 1' brings up the first when back on the first network... But overall love mutt and think aerc is a great initiative. Nice to have an inbuilt sidebar too! Beats recompiling mutt with sidebar patches. How's aerc with gpg, search, offline storage?
      - Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
        >How's aerc with gpg, search, offline storage? Currently, terrible. It doesn't support those things at all. It doesn't even have an email reader, it just lets you browse subjects at the moment. It's very much in dev, and I could use some help :) I intend to have excellent gpg support, decent search support, and no support for offline storage whatsoever.
- stevekemp 10y ago
  In that case, my "competitor", is another console-based client, scripted via Lua: https://github.com/lumail/lumail2/ https://github.com/lumail/lumail2/
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hiphopyo 10y ago
I always used what I saw as the simplest Mutt setup possible: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/ca8dc3ecba60bdee41abb241e6f6fc24 https://gist.github.com/anonymous/ca8dc3ecba60bdee41abb241e6... along with: mutt -f imaps://imap.gmail.com
jakeogh 10y ago
If you like mutt, you will really like alot. https://github.com/pazz/alot https://github.com/pazz/alot
- k2enemy 10y ago
  I tried alot years ago and loved it, but it had the huge caveat that it didn't write changes back to a maildir. This made it really hard to incorporate into a multi-device setup. Do you know if this has been added? I didn't see an obvious answer on the github page.
  - jakeogh 10y ago
    You mean write to the maildir sent folder? Or metadata like read and other tags? I don't have metadata sync but I bet there's a way to do it via xapian. For multi-device, I use a MDA[1] on postfix that writes to a maildir, and that's rsynced to my various boxes. When I send, ssh pipes the msg to sendmail on the server, which copies it to the .sent folder. [1]: https://github.com/jakeogh/gpgmda/blob/master/gpgmda https://github.com/jakeogh/gpgmda/blob/master/gpgmda

145 points by wheresvic1 10y ago

Is it possible to use mutt and Gmail without enabling lesssecureapps? I know this post deals with some of those issues (gpg keys and whatnot), and Google strongly recommends IMAP/SMTP protocol users switch to OAuth 2.0, etc.

bartbes 10y ago
I was honestly surprised to see all this gpg setup, yet no mention of application-specific passwords. I've been using email clients with what google now calls an "App password" for years.
- fishywang 10y ago
  "application-specific passwords" are not actually restricted to a single application. You can restrict the scope (only has access to your emails, for example), but any application could use this password to access your emails.
  - bartbes 10y ago
    Sure, but you can revoke them without changing your password or revoking other app passwords, making it much easier to recover if they do leak.
Elv13 10y ago
Yes, I do it, but honestly, it is a pain. I didn't look too hard, but at first glance it seems there is no way to get a persistent token to work. Everytime you don't renew your token after 1800 seconds, you have to open the google developer web page and get a new one.

brandur 10y ago

I've been using Mutt with Gmail for years to great effect, and would very much recommend the set up. The one caveat that I should point out (because it's not mentioned in the article) is that you will probably never be fully rid of official Gmail clients. There is still no good mechanism to use some features with Mutt like thread muting, and these are essential to effective email these days. It's also often more convenient to read certain types of email (e.g. messages that are heavy in multimedia) from a client that supports graphics. My usual habit is to read email in the web client or on mobile, and respond to or compose mail from within Mutt.

sigil 10y ago
> There is still no good mechanism to use some features with Mutt like thread muting. I use `collapse-thread` (Esc-v) on long threads I don't care about, but you're right this is less than ideal. New messages in the thread uncollapse it again, and there's no way to persist the collapsed state, so switching mailboxes or restarting mutt loses it.

Gxorgxo 10y ago

I love to use the terminal—I'm a Vim and tmux user—but I was never really able to switch to Mutt. I often receive emails with attached images or HTML code. Maybe some Mutt user can share with me some of the reasons why they like it so much?

h43z 10y ago
Mutt makes writing/reading/searching/managing email just really fast. Mutt also allows to pass the message body to an external program. This helps for formatting HTML mails. This is a snippet from my .mailcap file which renders HTML mail through lynx. text/html; lynx -dump -force_html %s; needsterminal; copiousoutput
- baldfat 10y ago
  I output my mutt to w3m with using feh for images. Not always the right tool for the job but it is an easy way to find out if it is.
setrofim_ 10y ago
- Seamlessly use Vim to write and edit email - Can easily deal with large volumes of email -- quickly tab through unread messages - Highlights text from previous emails in a thread, making it easy to see who replied to what - You can also set up highlighting for diffs, making it easy to review attached patches and change snippets - Powerful search via external indexers (mu, notmuch) - Keyboard navigation for everything (if you're using vim and tmux, then you're already spending most of your time with your hands on the keyboard, and having to fish for the mouse just to quicky reply to an email starts to feel really slow). For handling HTML email, I use a two-pronged approach: for most email I use links browser to automatically render HTML as ASCII so I can view it directly in mutt; for email that has images or otherwise cannot be rendered sensibly with links, I have mapped a key to open it in a graphical browser (dwb for fast launching or Firefox+vimperator if I need to deal with login forms, etc). EDIT: formatting
rsync 10y ago
I am a 20+ year (al)pine user (without gmail - I host my own mail server) and I have a fairly decent attachment/images/links setup ... First, I use ripmime to dump every single attachment to a folder with dated naming - and so if there is an email in pine with an attachment I want to view, I just web browse a simple apache directory listing and click it. It's not sexy, but it's fast and efficient. Second, I have a terminal PDF reader installed on my system and defined in alpine as a helper app for pdf files. So I cannot read word or excel right in alpine but I can read PDF docs. So that's nice and slick. Finally, I never actually click links in alpine, but I defined lynx as a web viewer anyway because that allows me to get the very simple "do you want to view this http link ?" prompt from alpine ... which I always say NO to, but not until I have copied the full URL which they display for me. Then I just open it in a browser. Fairly happy with this setup.

jrcii 10y ago

I've got Mutt going with Gmail along the lines of Steve Losh's advice http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/ http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/ It works great. Very fast, and it's nice to have a local backup of my email.

enzolovesbacon 10y ago
+1 I still haven't found any setup that beats it.
cbracken 10y ago
Agreed, by far the best guide I've found. My setup, based on that guide + some tweaks is at https://github.com/cbracken/mutt https://github.com/cbracken/mutt for anyone who might find another sample useful.
wheresvic1 10y ago
Yes, I was looking into the whole offline sync setup but I am a big fan of keeping a clean inbox so I just went with the current setup. Also, one advantage of this is that changes are real-time which means that if I check the gmail app on my phone messages are correctly moved, marked as read etc.

nabucodonosor 10y ago

Like the post. What I did differently is to use fdm to fetch emails and store them locally. I've been using Mutt with Gmail for many years. The features I like most are: - regex search - faster actions (like batch delete, mark as read) using tag - can use my editor to compose. I use emacsclient -nw and it's so easy to copy things from shared buffer. - very easy to customize, for example, I want to see the timestamp as local time regardless of the sender's timezone, I wrote a smile Go program to do that https://github.com/wujiang/localize_mutt; https://github.com/wujiang/localize_mutt; I also run a cronjob to archive old emails.

lighttower 10y ago

google-Calendar as a widget on my linux (mate) desktop. Aside from [1] does anyone have a working setup? [1] https://www.linux.com/learn/tricks-using-desktop-integrated-calendars https://www.linux.com/learn/tricks-using-desktop-integrated-...

jacobsenscott 10y ago

mutt + offlineimap + gmail is fantastic. When I need to use their web interface it is painful. mu gives you almost instant search, but I almost never need to search email so I don't have that dialed in.

ninjin 10y ago
I use a similar set-up, but I had a really bad time making offlineimap sync work. In the end I switched to isync which was easier to configure. It has fewer features, but it has worked out great for me with `Flatten .` turned on in the configuration file.
- jacobsenscott 10y ago
  Yeah. Offlineimap was a bear to get working right. I've heard good things about isync, but I don't really want to touch the house of cards now that it is all working.

daily-q 10y ago

Anyone here coming from nmh, but prefer to use Mutt? I was wondering if Mutt is worth the switch since some things in nmh seem hard to keep up to snuff with the ever-changing www.

dllthomas 10y ago
I much prefer nmh.

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago

Plug for the mutt replacement I'm working on: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/aerc https://github.com/SirCmpwn/aerc

bo1024 10y ago
Can you say what about mutt you dislike or want to improve?
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  Mutt doesn't do networking well. It was build to deal with Maildir and mbox on a local disk, not IMAP over the network. aerc is designed to just support IMAP, and it does networking on a second thread so issues there don't lock up the UI. aerc also supports multiple accounts. It also has (imo) better configuration and commands.
  - luxpir 10y ago
    Can confirm. Long-term mutt-er who frequently switches between wired and wireless networks. I basically just ctrl+z any frozen mutt instance and start over. 'fg 1' brings up the first when back on the first network... But overall love mutt and think aerc is a great initiative. Nice to have an inbuilt sidebar too! Beats recompiling mutt with sidebar patches. How's aerc with gpg, search, offline storage?
    - Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
      >How's aerc with gpg, search, offline storage? Currently, terrible. It doesn't support those things at all. It doesn't even have an email reader, it just lets you browse subjects at the moment. It's very much in dev, and I could use some help :) I intend to have excellent gpg support, decent search support, and no support for offline storage whatsoever.
stevekemp 10y ago
In that case, my "competitor", is another console-based client, scripted via Lua: https://github.com/lumail/lumail2/ https://github.com/lumail/lumail2/

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

hiphopyo 10y ago

I always used what I saw as the simplest Mutt setup possible: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/ca8dc3ecba60bdee41abb241e6f6fc24 https://gist.github.com/anonymous/ca8dc3ecba60bdee41abb241e6... along with: mutt -f imaps://imap.gmail.com

jakeogh 10y ago

If you like mutt, you will really like alot. https://github.com/pazz/alot https://github.com/pazz/alot

k2enemy 10y ago
I tried alot years ago and loved it, but it had the huge caveat that it didn't write changes back to a maildir. This made it really hard to incorporate into a multi-device setup. Do you know if this has been added? I didn't see an obvious answer on the github page.
- jakeogh 10y ago
  You mean write to the maildir sent folder? Or metadata like read and other tags? I don't have metadata sync but I bet there's a way to do it via xapian. For multi-device, I use a MDA[1] on postfix that writes to a maildir, and that's rsynced to my various boxes. When I send, ssh pipes the msg to sendmail on the server, which copies it to the .sent folder. [1]: https://github.com/jakeogh/gpgmda/blob/master/gpgmda https://github.com/jakeogh/gpgmda/blob/master/gpgmda