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Console based mail-clients are very powerful and fast to use. I was a long-time mutt user before I started writing my own mail client, with complete scriptin
by stevekemp 9y ago
Console based mail-clients are very powerful and fast to use. I was a long-time mutt user before I started writing my own mail client, with complete scripting provided by Lua.
Having a real scripting language allows a lot of useful features, at times using mutt felt a little bit too constrained, although it has a lot of features and is very very flexible in its own right:
https://github.com/lumail/lumail https://github.com/lumail/lumail
- seuss1969 9y agoThen you should try looking at NeoMutt (www.neomutt.org). It's a pseudo fork of Mutt that has added a lot of new features. Recently it landed full Lua scripting support as well. Guess you're not the only one that was looking for more powerful configuration within mutt.
- guyzmo 9y agoI'm guilty of the Lua feature, and even though it's only covering the existing muttrc API, it can already do quite a lot. The Lua feature is (not yet) turned on by default at compile time (and thus in systems distributions). I'd be very happy to have more feedback and help to extend further that API and have some great scripts happening!
- stevekemp 9y agoI think the point where Lua gets interesting is when it can be invoked when a new message is received, or you can iterate over message heads & the message-list(s) and process them automatically. For example you might have a folder of "backup results", you'd want to mark all that have a subject of "Backup OK" as read, and flag the ones that have a subject of "Backup FAILED" as "important". Those are the kind of tasks I automate with my lua-based mail-client. You can get more interesting and say "Keep only the most recent 100 messages in folder XXX" which applies whenever you either launch the client, or open a given folder too.
- worldsayshi 9y agoThe article seems to think that everyone should switch away from HTML. But how well does console clients deal with HTML emails. It's not like you can tell everyone to stop sending you HTML.
- seuss1969 9y agoMutt deals surprisingly well with HTML emails. Most newsletters and other HTML mails usually come with a plain text version as well which Mutt will preferably display. Apart from that, you can make mutt pipe the HTML Email to a console browser for rendering. It works transparently. I've been doing this for a while now
- u801e 9y agoI suppose that mutt could be configured to either display the plain text MIME part of such an email, or pipe the HTML through something like links -dump.
- Freaky 9y ago~/.mailcap: text/html; lynx -force_html -dump %s; copiousoutput ~/.muttrc: alternative_order text/plain
- vincentkriek 9y agoWhat made me switched back to Mutt was the ability to call subapplications to show you emails. As I always have a browser running, I can tell mutt to show it in firefox, which allows me to watch the HTML mail in all of it's glory (instead of a lynx like dump in the console which I do not like).
- matthiasl 9y agoI do exactly this too for the occasional mail that I really can't read as plain text. One concern is that I'm letting through all web bugs and, perhaps, outright malicious HTML. If anyone has a solution for that, something like filtering the HTML, I'd love to hear it.
- 9y ago
- rjzzleep 9y agoI found neomutt and find it to be nice. One thing that's been annoying me in mutt is that there is no unified inbox. Neomutt integrates notmuch as a first class citizen along with some other niceties(amongst others basic lua scripting). https://www.neomutt.org/changes/user https://www.neomutt.org/changes/user https://www.neomutt.org/2017/04/29/lua https://www.neomutt.org/2017/04/29/lua https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14567303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14567303
- daurnimator 9y agoooo, I didn't know about this. Prepare for a possible influx of bug reports and feature requests :)