6 ms·

https://neomutt.org/ https://neomutt.org/ The guy is absolutely right. Mutt is not a gimmick like ascii video on terminal. It actually makes a lot of sense as

by clon 8y ago

https://neomutt.org/ https://neomutt.org/ The guy is absolutely right. Mutt is not a gimmick like ascii video on terminal. It actually makes a lot of sense as an email client and is surprisingly ergonomic. I also enjoy the fact that my config is a normal dotfile that I can version control etc. Also, your passwords can be encrypted using the tools that you choose, as opposed to whatever home grown crypto (if any) the [insert random Electron email client] uses. Some ways are outlined here: https://www.mail-archive.com/mutt-users@mutt.org/msg36375.html https://www.mail-archive.com/mutt-users@mutt.org/msg36375.ht...

Fnoord 8y ago
Mutt/Neomutt is great once you got over the initial trauma of the keybinds and configuring the config plus theme. Except when it comes to HTML e-mail which is a lot more common that I'd like it to be. For a more up-to-date guide on how to use GPG for your e-mail password [1] [1] https://pthree.org/2012/01/07/encrypted-mutt-imap-smtp-passwords/ https://pthree.org/2012/01/07/encrypted-mutt-imap-smtp-passw...
- Boulth 8y ago
  Note that the GPG encryption itself is notoriously hard to configure unless one knows to just use gpgme backend (it should be configured by default!). Even then there is a lot of outdated code related to GPG in general (e.g. PKA, no way to locate key by email).
- too-soon-ago 8y ago
  That might be okay still with some HTML filtering. Just coerce it to plaintext. Not sure anything of value would be lost.
rsync 8y ago
"The guy is absolutely right. Mutt is not a gimmick like ascii video on terminal." I personally use (al)pine and I could not agree more. But here is a different, and I hope very provocative, reason that you should consider a terminal email client: Local mail delivery does not traverse the Internet, or any network. So, for instance, when I send an email to one of my engineers at rsync.net, even though it is sent in plaintext, it is a private communication and cannot be intercepted by either an ISP or some global observer. It's nothing but a local file operation between two mailspools... Further, it would be extremely difficult to phish someone who is viewing their email in the terminal. The effort that it takes to view and copy a URL is greater than the discernment required to identify it as suspicious - so you'll catch them every time.
- zokier 8y ago
  > But here is a different, and I hope very provocative, reason that you should consider a terminal email client: > Local mail delivery does not traverse the Internet, or any network. The implication here being that you are running the clients on the email server. Wouldn't you effectively get the same security by tunneling IMAP over SSH?
  - dsr_ 8y ago
    Any time you run the mail server and the clients connect directly to the mail server via encrypted paths (IMAP/S, SSH tunnel, VPN...) the Internet is not traversed, but the local network is.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    > The implication here being that you are running the clients on the email server. That's a common scenario, but most linux/BSD distros ship with some mail server software installed and configured to run out of the box, even if also set to not allow external connections, as that's how the system delivers messages to users (e.g. cron output, etc). So almost every linux/BSD is a mail server, even if it may not be the mail server. If there's a main box that people in your company connect to as a terminal, email to local accounts on that box is essentially a internal messaging system. Hell, you could throw an IRC server on there with no outside access and use terminal IRC clients to have your own private chat channel as well. Who needs slack?
    - digi_owl 8y ago
      Unix have all kinds of funny things if all happens within a single box. If you want to send someone a message, there is write (if the person have mesg set to yes). There is also talk, but it requires its own daemon. Seriously, _nix started out in the mainframe era. Meaning that the basic assumption was multiple terminals hooked up to a single computer, with a different user on each terminal. Sadly we have a generation or more that grew up with single user computers, and seems to insist on turning _nix into that rather than embrace what it can offer.
kbenson 8y ago
Oh, man, I still miss mutt. I should see about getting it set up again. I bet someone has a good config online somewhere for using it as an IMAP client with Gmail... The only thing that might throw people off is that it uses nano for creating your email... (from the video) Actually, IIRC it uses the EDITOR environment variable, with some sane fallbacks. I happily wrote emails in vim for years. That said, defaulting to nano with a quick and well known way to swap your buffer to vim (and possibly back) might be a better solution overall. I love vim and use it as my IDE, but the cost/benefit ratio isn't in it's favor when your average time spent on a reply might be very short or when you're writing freeform. Especially if your default config is for wordwrap off because you use it as an IDE... The other thing to make sure you get nailed down in Mutt is to set up links or elinks as your html view handler, so HTML-only emails can actually be read without extreme difficulty for those cases where a client sent an HTML email without a plain-text companion. The thing to remember for any program that allows complex configuration like mutt is that you can often search for other people's configs[1] and copy them as your own, and once you get better, you can copy portions of them and tweak as needed to get your own specific customized behavior. I ran FVWM2 as my window manager for over a decade, and I remember every 5-6 months I would do some searching to find interesting new behavior people had implemented that I could tweak and steal (like here[2]). Every time some interesting new UI feature would come out somewhere someone would implement it in FVWM within a couple months. 1: https://gitlab.com/muttmua/mutt/wikis/ConfigList https://gitlab.com/muttmua/mutt/wikis/ConfigList 2: https://www.box-look.org/browse/cat/143/ https://www.box-look.org/browse/cat/143/
- Biqh1 8y ago
  When I set up my personal gmail with Mutt, I used the following guides, if you're interested. None of them are perfect, so I did what most people do and took bits and bobs from all of them: 1. [https://smalldata.tech/blog/2016/09/10/gmail-with-mutt https://smalldata.tech/blog/2016/09/10/gmail-with-mutt] 2. [http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/ http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/] 3. [https://baptiste-wicht.com/posts/2014/07/a-mutt-journey-my-mutt-configuration.html https://baptiste-wicht.com/posts/2014/07/a-mutt-journey-my-m...]
anon102051 8y ago
What companies would let me use Mutt for email? I have a long list of ideal characteristics for an employer but have decided that a simple test might be that they let me use Mutt.
- sjtgraham 8y ago
  I have never worked in a job where even a single person cared about one's choice of email client.

by clon 8y ago

Fnoord 8y ago

Mutt/Neomutt is great once you got over the initial trauma of the keybinds and configuring the config plus theme. Except when it comes to HTML e-mail which is a lot more common that I'd like it to be. For a more up-to-date guide on how to use GPG for your e-mail password [1] [1] https://pthree.org/2012/01/07/encrypted-mutt-imap-smtp-passwords/ https://pthree.org/2012/01/07/encrypted-mutt-imap-smtp-passw...

Boulth 8y ago
Note that the GPG encryption itself is notoriously hard to configure unless one knows to just use gpgme backend (it should be configured by default!). Even then there is a lot of outdated code related to GPG in general (e.g. PKA, no way to locate key by email).
too-soon-ago 8y ago
That might be okay still with some HTML filtering. Just coerce it to plaintext. Not sure anything of value would be lost.

rsync 8y ago

"The guy is absolutely right. Mutt is not a gimmick like ascii video on terminal." I personally use (al)pine and I could not agree more. But here is a different, and I hope very provocative, reason that you should consider a terminal email client: Local mail delivery does not traverse the Internet, or any network. So, for instance, when I send an email to one of my engineers at rsync.net, even though it is sent in plaintext, it is a private communication and cannot be intercepted by either an ISP or some global observer. It's nothing but a local file operation between two mailspools... Further, it would be extremely difficult to phish someone who is viewing their email in the terminal. The effort that it takes to view and copy a URL is greater than the discernment required to identify it as suspicious - so you'll catch them every time.

zokier 8y ago
> But here is a different, and I hope very provocative, reason that you should consider a terminal email client: > Local mail delivery does not traverse the Internet, or any network. The implication here being that you are running the clients on the email server. Wouldn't you effectively get the same security by tunneling IMAP over SSH?
- dsr_ 8y ago
  Any time you run the mail server and the clients connect directly to the mail server via encrypted paths (IMAP/S, SSH tunnel, VPN...) the Internet is not traversed, but the local network is.
- kbenson 8y ago
  > The implication here being that you are running the clients on the email server. That's a common scenario, but most linux/BSD distros ship with some mail server software installed and configured to run out of the box, even if also set to not allow external connections, as that's how the system delivers messages to users (e.g. cron output, etc). So almost every linux/BSD is a mail server, even if it may not be the mail server. If there's a main box that people in your company connect to as a terminal, email to local accounts on that box is essentially a internal messaging system. Hell, you could throw an IRC server on there with no outside access and use terminal IRC clients to have your own private chat channel as well. Who needs slack?
  - digi_owl 8y ago
    Unix have all kinds of funny things if all happens within a single box. If you want to send someone a message, there is write (if the person have mesg set to yes). There is also talk, but it requires its own daemon. Seriously, _nix started out in the mainframe era. Meaning that the basic assumption was multiple terminals hooked up to a single computer, with a different user on each terminal. Sadly we have a generation or more that grew up with single user computers, and seems to insist on turning _nix into that rather than embrace what it can offer.

kbenson 8y ago

Oh, man, I still miss mutt. I should see about getting it set up again. I bet someone has a good config online somewhere for using it as an IMAP client with Gmail... The only thing that might throw people off is that it uses nano for creating your email... (from the video) Actually, IIRC it uses the EDITOR environment variable, with some sane fallbacks. I happily wrote emails in vim for years. That said, defaulting to nano with a quick and well known way to swap your buffer to vim (and possibly back) might be a better solution overall. I love vim and use it as my IDE, but the cost/benefit ratio isn't in it's favor when your average time spent on a reply might be very short or when you're writing freeform. Especially if your default config is for wordwrap off because you use it as an IDE... The other thing to make sure you get nailed down in Mutt is to set up links or elinks as your html view handler, so HTML-only emails can actually be read without extreme difficulty for those cases where a client sent an HTML email without a plain-text companion. The thing to remember for any program that allows complex configuration like mutt is that you can often search for other people's configs[1] and copy them as your own, and once you get better, you can copy portions of them and tweak as needed to get your own specific customized behavior. I ran FVWM2 as my window manager for over a decade, and I remember every 5-6 months I would do some searching to find interesting new behavior people had implemented that I could tweak and steal (like here[2]). Every time some interesting new UI feature would come out somewhere someone would implement it in FVWM within a couple months. 1: https://gitlab.com/muttmua/mutt/wikis/ConfigList https://gitlab.com/muttmua/mutt/wikis/ConfigList 2: https://www.box-look.org/browse/cat/143/ https://www.box-look.org/browse/cat/143/

Biqh1 8y ago
When I set up my personal gmail with Mutt, I used the following guides, if you're interested. None of them are perfect, so I did what most people do and took bits and bobs from all of them: 1. [https://smalldata.tech/blog/2016/09/10/gmail-with-mutt https://smalldata.tech/blog/2016/09/10/gmail-with-mutt] 2. [http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/ http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/] 3. [https://baptiste-wicht.com/posts/2014/07/a-mutt-journey-my-mutt-configuration.html https://baptiste-wicht.com/posts/2014/07/a-mutt-journey-my-m...]

anon102051 8y ago

What companies would let me use Mutt for email? I have a long list of ideal characteristics for an employer but have decided that a simple test might be that they let me use Mutt.

sjtgraham 8y ago
I have never worked in a job where even a single person cared about one's choice of email client.