3 ms·

I hope you don't consider my reply irrelevant, but I use mutt. It's roughly similar: fast, efficient, terminal-based. GUI mail readers are simply not capable of

I hope you don't consider my reply irrelevant, but I use mutt. It's roughly similar: fast, efficient, terminal-based. GUI mail readers are simply not capable of doing what I want. Also, with mutt, I can parcel out tasks such as spam filtering and searching to dedicated programs designed for those purposes.

kzisme 9y ago
What sort of things does a typical mail client not allow you to do/tweak that Mutt does?
- leephillips 9y ago
  For example, copy all messages from my inbox with subject "debug" that are older than 200 days into a new mailbox file, with just a few keystrokes, instantly, even if my inbox contains 10,000 messages.
- craftyguy 9y ago
  Vim bindings out of the box
stevekemp 9y ago
I used mutt for years, but missed a folder-overview that updated dynamically. That made me switch to mutt-patched (the debian name of the package), which included the excellent "sidebar" facility. The sidebar gives you a list of all your folders you could scroll up and down, and was easily visible. You could also toggle it to show folders which only contained unread mail. Over time I got annoyed that this still wasn't flexible enough. What if you only wanted to show folders which had received only new mail in the past 24 hours? In the end I wrote my own console-based mail-client, which uses lua for scripting: https://lumail.org/ https://lumail.org/ This allows me to automate many things, for example I can mark each mail about a system-backup as read - if it succeeded, this level of automation isn't possible easily with mutt. Having a _real_ configuration language and binding functions to keys is very very handy though. I didn't ever expect my client to become super-popular, as it seems few people choose console clients these days, but it is nice to see that it has a little bit of love.

3 ms·

I hope you don't consider my reply irrelevant, but I use mutt. It's roughly similar: fast, efficient, terminal-based. GUI mail readers are simply not capable of

by leephillips 9y ago

kzisme 9y ago
What sort of things does a typical mail client not allow you to do/tweak that Mutt does?
- leephillips 9y ago
  For example, copy all messages from my inbox with subject "debug" that are older than 200 days into a new mailbox file, with just a few keystrokes, instantly, even if my inbox contains 10,000 messages.
- craftyguy 9y ago
  Vim bindings out of the box
stevekemp 9y ago
I used mutt for years, but missed a folder-overview that updated dynamically. That made me switch to mutt-patched (the debian name of the package), which included the excellent "sidebar" facility. The sidebar gives you a list of all your folders you could scroll up and down, and was easily visible. You could also toggle it to show folders which only contained unread mail. Over time I got annoyed that this still wasn't flexible enough. What if you only wanted to show folders which had received only new mail in the past 24 hours? In the end I wrote my own console-based mail-client, which uses lua for scripting: https://lumail.org/ https://lumail.org/ This allows me to automate many things, for example I can mark each mail about a system-backup as read - if it succeeded, this level of automation isn't possible easily with mutt. Having a _real_ configuration language and binding functions to keys is very very handy though. I didn't ever expect my client to become super-popular, as it seems few people choose console clients these days, but it is nice to see that it has a little bit of love.