22 ms·

Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

722 points by jcamou 7y ago

paulhilbert 7y ago
Is there any way I can see the name of attached files?
drejay 7y ago
Should you need a good hacker, talk to darkcracker@protonmail.com
pmoriarty 7y ago
I have to be skeptical of any email client that's not integrated in to Emacs.
- craftyguy 7y ago
  As someone who doesn't want to completely throw away their workflow and muscle memory, I consider that a feature.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  What about integrating emacs into aerc? You can set your EDITOR to emacs and replace aerc's default keybindings with a more emacs-inspired set. Send me your binds.conf and I'll add it to contrib in case anyone else wants an emacs-esque setup, too!
  - pmoriarty 7y ago
    "You can set your EDITOR to emacs and replace aerc's default keybindings with a more emacs-inspired set." I appreciate the suggestion, but unfortunately that's not even remotely adequate. By integration I mean exposing every single function and UI element of the client to Emacs, so that they can be bound, wrapped and extended as needed. Ideally, these functions would be written in eLisp, so they themselves could be modified and customized to taste while leveraging the enormous Emacs eLisp ecosystem. Emacs email clients have this sort of integration, and it is what gives them tremendous flexibility and power.
    - ddevault 7y ago
      I'm not ignorant of how emacs works - I was just giving you a cheeky response to your cheeky comment.
      - microcolonel 7y ago
        You can also say that Gnus is slow, if you want to be extra cheeky. As currently configured, opening gnus on my (admittedly a bit large) Maildir takes more than an hour (no, really, I'm not joking); of course, once it's up I dare not close it, and that works out fine for me.
        BeetleB 7y ago
        >You can also say that Gnus is slow, if you want to be extra cheeky. gnus is not the only way to do email in Emacs. IME, it is the most bloated way to do it. While I didn't like the tone of the person's comment, I do sympathize with him. I used various email programs (pine, mutt, Thunderbird, etc) for years - but all of them seemed to lack something, and the effort to add my desired features was too high. With Emacs, the barrier to customize my workflow is a lot lower. Now that I've been using Emacs + notmuch for mail for the last few years, it's really hard to motivate myself to try anything outside Emacs, and the feeling is much worse when it's something cool like this. I even haven't bothered with alot, although it is notmuch based. I mean, is it trivial for me to make an Org mode TODO linking to an email while in alot?
    - cweagans 7y ago
      If you want this level of integration with emacs, it seems like an emacs mail client would be better suited for your workflow...
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Every interactive program evolves until it contains Emacs. Even Emacs.
  - hestefisk 7y ago
    With that kind of meta recursion, we need to make Emacs part of the Emacs acronym itself.
    - ashton314 7y ago
      Emacs Makes All Computers Superb
0vermorrow 7y ago
Love the idea, and I really will give this a go as a daily driver. Just a small feedback: I had trouble with one of the requirements -> scdoc, didn't know what exactly that is (Googling didn't help), so might be worth to provide a direct link in the README.md to https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc/ https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc/
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  scdoc is probably available in your Linux distro's package manager, and aerc is designed to be packager-friendly - so eventually the idea is that most users will apt install aerc, rather than build it themselves.
  - 0vermorrow 7y ago
    Yeah, the problem is I am on OSX, and I actually had to compile scdoc myself without the -static flag (missing libraries). Also, I had to run it as: TERM=xterm-256color aerc On OSX, otherwise got: panic: terminal entry not found
    - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
      This issue comes from tcell, which has a baked-in terminfo database. I'm also not sure about the state of the terminfo database in general on OSX... in any case, I plan on improving terminfo support in tcell at some point.
      - 0vermorrow 7y ago
        It's probably because i use xterm-kitty. Awesome work on aerc, looking forward for continued development.
        kabacha 7y ago
        Can confirm, am running Kitty too and ran into exact same error messages, exporting different TERM environment variable did fix this though!
ncmncm 7y ago
I saw the title [was: "World's Best Email Client"] and thought, "yeah, sure". But WOW. It's the e-mail of my dreams. Take my money, damn you! EDIT: I may have been seduced by the clicky keyboard noises in the video. But no! Is good! EDIT2: I forgive you for Wayland.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  I notice aerc is not on the list of projects to donate for...
  - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
    Whoops, it is now!
GlenTheMachine 7y ago
Exchange compatibility? Asking for a friend;)
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/clients/pop3-and-imap4/configure-imap4?view=exchserver-2019 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/clients/pop3-and-i... I have no interest in first-class exchange support upstream.
- craftyguy 7y ago
  Can exchange do IMAP?
  - edoceo 7y ago
    Yes
    - craftyguy 7y ago
      Then it 'supports' exchange. \o/
      - GlenTheMachine 7y ago
        It can but whether it does depends on your local IT. Which means it doesn't.
ryjo 7y ago
I can tell from the video that the interface is quite easy to navigate if you're a vim user. Very impressive work!
Avamander 7y ago
How's the UTF-8 e-mail address support? As most clients suck so bad at that it would be awesome to have an alternative. How's the GPG and S/MIME support? We'd really need an e-mail client that has first class support of both. Current solutions I've tried are cumbersome at best. Having those two it'd actually be the best e-mail client for me.
- jgalt212 7y ago
  > UTF-8 e-mail address support? hard pass on this as it encourages dark patterns.
  - throwaway2048 7y ago
    You mean like speaking any other language besides english?
    - danielscrubs 7y ago
      I think he is thinking about that some letters look identical but are encoded differently. So someone will not be able to look at an email address and say: oh it’s from such and such.
      - Arkanosis 7y ago
        Trusting one's eyes is doomed to failure anyway. That's what PGP is for.
      - Avamander 7y ago
        That's a side-effect of UTF-8, yes, but my primary concern was indeed non-English e-mail addresses, people should have the right to use their own names. You have GPG for identity validation though.
        jgalt212 7y ago
        good luck getting your mom to implement that.
megous 7y ago
It can't do maildir. I tried mdir:/// maildir:/// file:/// and /. grep -R maildir of the code returns nothing. So I guess, using it on local mail is a no go. Sad. I tried it only because this was advertised, only to be disappointed. It's better to not advertise features you don't have. Or at least state what features you have instead of mixing what you have and have not into a feature list at random. It's also far cry from the configurability of the mutt/neomutt. But that can change. It would certainly be nice to have a properly scriptable terminal based MUA, as neomutt, while nice, and flexible, is kind of hard to configure.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  There's a big red disclaimer on this page that says the feature list is a bit wishful, and the latest version is only 0.1.0. The docs (man pages, start with man aerc) only document implemented features, you may want to start there. Here's the ticket for maildir support: https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/16 https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/16 Several people have expressed interest in working on this, I expect we'll see it for 0.2.0. As far as configurability is concerned, yeah, the plan is to continue making it more customizable and configurable. Stuff like filters already afford you a lot of options today. At some point I might also be interested in adding a fifo you can use to feed commands into it from a script, too, for turing-complete customization.
  - megous 7y ago
    Yeah, I read it, assumming that easier features would be implemented first. I still think it's better to split the list into what is completed and roadmap. It would help me track the progress. Anyway, good luck. I'll keep my eye on the project, because it certainly seems interesting.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
      I don't believe on implementing the easy features first. If you implement the hard features first, its smooth sailing for the rest of the project! If you would like to keep track of specific features, check out the bug tracker: https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2 https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2
kkotak 7y ago
lol!
russellbeattie 7y ago
My least favorite email begins with a +Russell at the top, meaning that there's been a long email thread that I haven't been a part of, and now I've been pulled in. The text below that is your standard mess of email text: 1) It's in reverse chronological order starting at the bottom. 2) Each message has 4 or 5 lines of "to", "from", "cc", "subject" and "date" in between. 3) Previous messages might or might not be repeated by other email clients 4) All with varying levels of indenting. This has to be a common problem. Are there any libraries, projects, email clients or scripts to help parse it all into something readable? I've looked and haven't found zip. I know Slack is the new hotness, but for the rest of us stuck in email, this is a daily hell. The progress of email clients basically stopped in the mid-2000s. I swear, the first email client that actually solves this problem will be the next billion dollar business.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
  The solution is to have the thread forwarded as message/rfc822 attachments instead of full quote madness.
  - russellbeattie 7y ago
    This is definitely already a solved problem - for open or homogeneous platforms. This is why it's still an issue for everyone else... Microsoft's general attitude is, "everyone should use Outlook", Apple wants you to use Mail, Google wants everyone on Gmail, etc. I'm sure this is rarely an issue inside those companies - threading "just works" since coworkers all use the same clients. So not only do they have zero financial reason to support interop or openness, they probably don't even know its an issue.
keyle 7y ago
It's good to know that the world's best email client is still a work in progress.
cweagans 7y ago
I dunno what it is about the screencast, but it takes _forever_ to load. Any chance you could upload to Youtube or something so that I can actually watch the thing? EDIT: I'm getting about 20kb/s download from sr.ht where the video is hosted. Definitely not an issue with my connection, as I can download other files right now at 2Mb/s.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- microdrum 7y ago
  Agree. Can he throw it on Streamable or something? EDIT: Here it is: https://streamable.com/3ysv9 https://streamable.com/3ysv9
- dcbadacd 7y ago
  Native player in Chrome doesn't seem to download videos in big enough chunks or doesn't buffer well enough for smooth playback in some cases. I've seen it several times myself.
elagost 7y ago
I'd leave Thunderbird in a heartbeat if I could find a contact/calendar syncing terminal client as well. Any recommendations?
- cik 7y ago
  I currently use Thunderbird for mail, and MineTime for calendar. I found the Thunderbird calendar integrations (5 calendars) way too flaky.
  - krzyk 7y ago
    Would be good to have a calendar client in terminal. MineTime looks cool, but I got a wrong feeling about the looks and yeah, scrolling down and I saw it: "MineTime is a calendar built on Electron". Nah, I prefer to have just one browser open (and not Chrome/Chromium).
- benoliver999 7y ago
  I use Khard for contacts and khal for calendar. Neither handle syncing, so I use vdirsyncer for that (you can use anything you like or just go local only). https://github.com/scheibler/khard https://github.com/scheibler/khard https://github.com/pimutils/khal https://github.com/pimutils/khal https://github.com/pimutils/vdirsyncer https://github.com/pimutils/vdirsyncer
- Allamann 7y ago
  Have a look at vdirsyncer, khard, and khal. This in combination with mbsyc is my CLI PIM sync :)
carimura 7y ago
You did it! Congratulations! World's best email client! Great job, everybody!
throwaway_x13zd 7y ago
Thank you Sir_Cmpwn, awesome that someone is picking up where mutt left off.
- stevekemp 7y ago
  My attempt was https://lumail.org/ https://lumail.org/ a console-based mail-client inspired by mutt, but with 100% lua scripting.
anarazel 7y ago
Looks interesting! Based on a quick stroll through the source code, I don't see any search integration. Is that correct? I guess I could just shell out to notmuch? But I do find virtual folders for searches really convenient. Currently using neomutt with notmuch support, over a Maildir (which in turn is separately synced via IMAP using mbsync). Not having all the context vanish ala mutt would sure be nice.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  There's a ticket planned for adding a notmuch backend straight up: https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/105 https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/105 No indirection through mbsync & maildir. This shouldn't be terribly hard - if you're interested in working on this feature, swing by the IRC channel to get a rundown of the technical details. There's also a ticket for search in general: https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/93 https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/93 Which will probably be implemented for IMAP by 0.2.0.
  - anarazel 7y ago
    Thanks for the references! I personally work offline for a fair bit (personally more productive that way, and I'm also traveling plenty for work). So I kinda like the mbsync & maildir indirection (although I do hate the lack of NOTIFY, and some other imap inefficiencies around not supporting QRESYNC etc).
  - em-bee 7y ago
    i am looking forward to this. i am currently using supmua, the ancestor of notmuch, and i haven't been able to switch to any other notmuch based terminal client because their interfaces all felt inferior to sup. aerc is the first client i see that does the interface with multiple switchable screens right from the start. notmuch integration with the ability to keep virtual folders based on tags and on searches is the only thing keeping me from trying out aerc right now. i'll be keeping an eye on it.
    - rakoo 7y ago
goerz 7y ago
How does this compare to mutt?
- megous 7y ago
  Mutt/Neomutt is much more mature and has more features and better performance. (fantastic threads support, fast and very flexible filtering, etc.) Aerc is very new and written in Go. I tested it on my 100 thousnand mail ARM linux mailing list archive, accessed via localhost dovecot IMAP server, to see the best case performance, but it doesn't look good, atm. It looks like this when I scroll through the archive: https://megous.com/dl/tmp/cjitwkaxpsypgcfdvncr.mp4 https://megous.com/dl/tmp/cjitwkaxpsypgcfdvncr.mp4 It's not really comparable to mutt, yet. The performance is slow, and it doesn't support threads, which is a must for MUA.
  - ddevault 7y ago
    aerc doesn't download all of your message headers upfront - mutt does. All that time you spend waiting for mutt to open your inbox is downloading all of the data that aerc is downloading as you scroll. Also, you can scroll faster with ^d/^u, half a page at a time, or pgup/pgdown, for a full page at a time. Yes, aerc is not yet as featureful or mature as mutt, but it definitely does not have inferior performance.
    - megous 7y ago
      I use POP3, and only wait for mutt when changing to a folder (4s/100k mails). Then everything is basically instantaneous. But yeah, I don't know about mutt IMAP performance, as I never used it. I've only configured a local IMAP server over my maildir to be able to try aerc. I have no clue why aerc is taking 100-200ms to load a single message (as you see in the video) from the localhost. Maybe naggle (is it even used on localhost)? Also, I'm not sure how you'd make threads work while loading message list only partially. So full load of the message list is needed anyway (at least once and cache it locally). It's not some failing. I want thread that started 5 months ago to pop forward if new message is posted to it. EDIT: Faster scrolling loads multiple messages at once faster. Maybe aerc can take into account that user may have scrolled past more than one message in the time the previous message finished loading.
badosu 7y ago
Pretty amazing! Some observations: - Attachments that don't have a filter can't be visualized. For this case would be interesting to open with 'xdg-open' when hit <Enter>, and/or '.mailcap' support. - Account password is stored in plaintext - Occasional rendering artifacts when switching tabs/folders If those above are fixed plus theming, unread, etc. I can easily see myself using it as my daily driver.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  >Attachments that don't have a filter can't be visualized You can use :save or :pipe on these, but yeah - xdg-open would also be cool. Mailcap support would also be great. >Account password is stored in plaintext In a chmod 600 file, though. There's also an option for configuring a command to run to retrieve your password by e.g. decrypting it with gpg: see aerc-imap(5), or :help imap, for details.
  - badosu 7y ago
    It seems ':pipe' sends the data to stdin, I was trying to see a pdf file and the programs I tried (evince, mupdf) do not seem to support this (or perhaps usage is different?). Seems like a good patch to implement a command that saves to a temporary file and opens with provided program, will certainly follow development, great work!
    - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
      https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/125 https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/125 :)
microcolonel 7y ago
Gnus has been great for me, but after about 40k+ (I stopped looking at the counts actually) messages in my Maildir, performance suffers for me (that is, if I start gnus from scratch it takes more than an hour and a half to open, with my entire Maildir in the page cache, and a huge amount of extremely fast memory). Notmuch doesn't seem to help at all, or if it would, it's hard to tell if it's configured correctly.
- cjbprime 7y ago
  That's a little odd -- I was using gnus with maildirs that size ten years ago and it wasn't so bad. nnmaildir backend for gnus, right? I remember something about increasing the emacs memory limit before garbage collection kicks in, too.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    > I remember something about increasing the emacs memory limit before garbage collection kicks in, too. That seems interesting, I'll look at that. If there's one thing I have, it is a lot of memory. I would be okay if my whole Maildir was mmapped, as long as that made gnus faster.
    - egh 7y ago
      (I have used Wanderlust on emacs for about 15 years now.) I think using maildir directly may be hard to squeeze good performance out of with emacs. I'd suggest trying the alternatives: for eample, IMAP with ~30k messages should work decently in Wanderlust (and I would assume gnus), though initial load is slow (way less than hours, though). Using mu (maildir utils) via search in wanderlust to load 30k messages take about 1 minute, but if you are using mu you should be searching, not loading an entire mailbox. So there are probably some options out there, but I'd avoid loading 40k messages from a maildir directly.
- csomar 7y ago
  40k email? That sounds too much if it is for a single person. If you get 10 email per days for 10 years, you'd not get to 40k (35.6k). My suggestion will be to clean your mailbox instead of finding a new client.
euske 7y ago
I wonder how good it is with wide width characters (in CJK languages). Handling them in a terminal is rather tricky, and I haven't seen anything that's good except ones that are developed by the actual users of the language.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  aerc dev here. I am a fluent speaker of Japanese and frequently work with CJK characters in the client.
- manjana 7y ago
  I also think it is really only your terminal and fonts that have a say at how wide characters are handled (as well as Xresources if you run GNU/Linux). If you are on Linux a modern terminal emulator with great capabilities is kovidgoyal/kitty at Github.
sikhnerd 7y ago
Very cool! How does this compare to sup / mutt / alpine / astroid ?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sulfastor 7y ago
Doesn't work on Terminator.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  Set TERM=xterm and try again. tcell (the library aerc uses to render its UI) has a really annoying built-in terminfo database, which at some point I plan on fixing myself.
inetknght 7y ago
Hmmm, I'm not familiar with command line email clients but this looks cool. I wonder if I can use aerc in a bash pipeline? Say, to pipe email content from/to gpg?
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  You can't pipe emails into aerc (yet?), but you can definitely pipe emails out of aerc. The :pipe command is bound to | by default, so you can type, for example, |gpg --decrypt | less<Enter>.
cjbprime 7y ago
Neat! I used to be a kernel maintainer, and had a similar setup going inside emacs with gnus, and dvc-git commands bound to keys to apply patches. Here's an old blog post about some of it: https://blog.printf.net/articles/2010/10/04/git-patches-in-gnus/ https://blog.printf.net/articles/2010/10/04/git-patches-in-g... Gnus was too slow, but worse, emacs is single-threaded, so e.g. polling for new mail in the background blocked the rest of the editor while it happened. I never understood why it was impossible to have any kind of multithreading in emacs.
- ddevault 7y ago
  Hey, would you mind writing up some details about your email setup for kernel work to sir@cmpwn.com? I'd like to understand more email-driven workflows, especially from kernel maintainers, to guide aerc's design.
  - cjbprime 7y ago
    Hm! I can't think of much to add, except.. the next thing I would've worked on might've been to integrate a client for https://patchwork.kernel.org/ https://patchwork.kernel.org/ to keep it in sync and mark patches there as handled.
    - ddevault 7y ago
      Thanks! I wonder if you've seen my work with mailing lists on sourcehut, by the way? https://sourcehut.org https://sourcehut.org I'm working on a replacement for patchwork. Here's an example of a thread which was rendered with my tool, which is just generated from organic mail threads without extra human intervention: https://lists.sr.ht/~philmd/qemu/patches/5556 https://lists.sr.ht/~philmd/qemu/patches/5556 If you have more feedback or thoughts around this, I'd love to hear it too :)
    - ajdlinux 7y ago
      A Patchwork client (well, a tool that does some of the more useful patchwork status updating, it's not a full client as such) for notmuch, which has a number of kernel dev users: https://github.com/stewart-ibm/pwnm-sync https://github.com/stewart-ibm/pwnm-sync
chrissnell 7y ago
I really, really like that the editor is embedded within the mail client. The need to shell out to vim or whatever is what always kept me from using Mutt, despite loving its UI. aerc isn't quite as colorful or well-laid-out as Mutt but this is very promising. This reminds me a lot of my all-time favorite mail editor, which I miss dearly: GoldED [0] [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoldED https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoldED [1] https://blog.onlime.ru/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CwkTcNSWQAAeOq0.jpg https://blog.onlime.ru/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CwkTcNSWQA... (Russian screenshot but you get the idea)
- fouc 7y ago
  Some color would be nice. (I quite like Irssi's color scheme)
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    > (I quite like Irssi's color scheme) Irssi's default color scheme which, incidentally, is the same as Mutt's default. Both can be changed. For example, to a solarized color scheme.
Aloha 7y ago
Any chance one could convince you to also support nano as a editor option?
- ddevault 7y ago
  Just set EDITOR=nano in your environment, or add it to your aerc.conf. It already works :)
sulfastor 7y ago
Why account passwords are stored on plaintext after the wizard? How do you encrypt them while configuring?
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  man aerc-imap for details, you can specify an external command to run. The creds file is chmod 600, and most other email clients (e.g. thunderbird) are also storing your creds in plaintext - it's just less obvious cause they put them in sqlite or something.
- necovek 7y ago
  Unless you are willing to provide a decryption key on every "check my email" call (eg. every 5 minutes), an email client (or well, anything requiring frequent reauthorization) virtually has to have it in "plain text" (or any obfuscated form which is equivalent to plain text). Workable alternatives are to store the decryption key in memory for the runtime of the program (eg. using login keyrings or per-app logic). If you encrypt your $HOME or your entire disk, storing it in plain text achieves roughly the same level of protection (eg. decryption key is in the memory).
tzs 7y ago
How easy is it to tell it what IMAP folders to use for sent mail, deleted mail, and drafts? A while back, I engaged in epic combat against Apple Mail on my Mac, Apple's iOS mail app on my iPhone, Outlook on my Mac, Outlook on my gaming PC, Outlook on my Surface Pro 4, and Thunderbird on my Mac to banish the blight of, e.g., Sent, Sent Mail, and Sent Messages, and similar for drafts and deleted. It was an epic struggle, but I finally got them to all agree on Sent, Trash, Drafts (and Junk for spam). I'm not going near any other email client now without being sure I can tell it to use those before I let it have access to my IMAP.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  Easy, you can change what folder it treats as sent. It doesn't have a trash bin (and it won't) or draft support (and it will) yet.
  - mbreese 7y ago
    Out of curiosity, why won’t there be a Trash bin? What about an Archive folder?
    - epse 7y ago
      You can just make an archive folder and copy emails there, or set up a shortcut to archive emails.
    - brokenkebab 7y ago
      Trash bin (for messages, or files) is a poor man's replacement for making backup copies.
      - x3ro 7y ago
        I think that's an oversimplification.. let's say I have daily backups. Let's also say I'm opening my email client in the morning and receive 20 mails, but because I haven't had any coffee yet I accidentally delete the wrong one, which I realize 15 seconds later. Now that mail is gone and I have no way to retrieve it.. (No, paying more attention is not a solution. People inevitably make these kinds of mistakes)
bayareanative 7y ago
Does anyone use alpine?
- tramtrist 7y ago
  Yes, and it works so well that I cannot imagine what the benefits of Aerc could have over it. I guess I'll have to do a comparison !
- clort 7y ago
  Yes and my muscle memory goes back a long way.. I like some of the stated features on the webpage though, Aerc seems like something to keep an eye on.
tobias2014 7y ago
What about full text search? This feature has brought me to from mutt to sup to alot: https://alot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://alot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- ddevault 7y ago
  notmuch support is planned! It shouldn't be too hard, if an interested user were to take ownership over the feature it could probably ship in 0.2.0. Want to help?
  - hu3 7y ago
    Since the client is written in Go, I believe this could be easily done with https://blevesearch.com https://blevesearch.com
    - ddevault 7y ago
      Eh, I would rather use notmuch than develop my own index from scratch. Keep it email, yo.
  - e12e 7y ago
    Curious if you've looked at nmh and mu (maildir utils)? The last time I looked, it wasn't obvious that notmuch was the better option. And also if you've looked at jmap? It's my distinct impression that the jmap effort isn't a case of nih, but rather stems from a real need of avoiding imap limitations (in idle, various levels of extension support). One of my project ideas, for a long time, has been to figure out if dbmail might be tricked into being a decent jmap server via a graphql(like) proxy on top of postgres...
dllthomas 7y ago
As another point in the space, have you looked at nmh? https://www.nongnu.org/nmh/ https://www.nongnu.org/nmh/
shereadsthenews 7y ago
Is it groundbreaking to display mail with an external pager or to pipe it to filters? These were/are core features of elm, from 1986.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  IMO the key innovation is that aerc does it with an embedded terminal emulator, tmux-style. This allows you to keep using the client for other things while reading or composing emails.
  - shereadsthenews 7y ago
    That is interesting and different. I guess I am accustomed to the "unix way": I use screen to multiplex my terminal and I have no bad problems from running multiple instances of mutt on the same maildir.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
      That workflow to me seems like more of a hack begging to be improved than a comfortable daily driver. I've never had a problem running mulitple instances of mutt, either - and I run multiple instances of aerc sometimes, actually - but since aerc has ownership over your emails and mail accounts it only makes sense to me that it would multiplex them for you.
      - zokier 7y ago
        I'd argue that the aerc approach is also bit of hack[1], but ultimately it mostly boils down to the limitations of terminals; to have "sub-windows", you need to implement basically a whole windowing system and terminal emulation layer. Makes me think what would email client designed for and integrated with tmux look like, i.e. the client would open new tmux panes for editors etc. [1] don't take that as a hard criticism, I happen to think lot of things, especially around terminals, being hacks.
        7y ago
ilovecaching 7y ago
What the TL;DR; difference between Aerc and mutt?
- fiatjaf 7y ago
  Watch the video. Aerc is usable.
  - ilovecaching 7y ago
    I currently use mutt and have no problems with it, what's the issue?
    - fiatjaf 7y ago
      You don't want to hear, but I tried to use mutt with Gmail.
rlue 7y ago
I haven't dug too deep into the features or how this works yet, but it's very exciting to see any kind of movement in this space at all. I've spent a lot of time configuring mutt just the way I like it, but I'd throw it all away in a heartbeat for a good, modern alternative. My wishlist: * A daemon that pulls new mail from my IMAP servers to my local maildir as soon as it arrives. (I know mutt has an IMAP mode, and it looks like that's aerc's primary mode of operation, too, but I like to have a local copy of my entire mail archive.) * Rendering plain text markdown into multipart/html emails. I love me some plaintext, but no one else in my life even knows what a terminal is. 80-char lines are too short for desktop displays and too long for small phones (leading to awful linebreaks), which makes me the guy whose emails never look right.
- stevekemp 7y ago
  I came up with my own mutt-alike, written with Lua for real scripting. Sadly it seems these projects are pretty niche, they're also damn hard to write. I spent a lot of time fighting with malformed MIME messages, etc. Then adding on GPG-support, and handling the UI, all becomes a huge time-sync. Still I now have a client that I love, even if nobody else does! https://lumail.org/ https://lumail.org/
  - tonyarkles 7y ago
    > malformed MIME My god. I tried parsing my gmail “All Messages” once as part of a project. It ended up being an amazing corpus of a zillion ways to do MIME wrong. Project didn’t get off the ground because even after handling all of my weird cases, every new user ended up blowing up the parser again. Yeesh.
  - marmaduke 7y ago
    Doesn’t claws have a reusable library for that sort of thing?
- u801e 7y ago
  > 80-char lines are too short for desktop displays and too long for small phones (leading to awful linebreaks), which makes me the guy whose emails never look right. RFC 3676 [1] describes the format MIME parameter for text/plain content type documents which solves this issue. Unfortunately, it does not work well when sending inline patches via email since it introduces trailing whitespace. [1] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt
nfoz 7y ago
This looks fantastic. Thanks!!
diehunde 7y ago
Any idea how to fix this error?: panic: Attempted to draw outside of context goroutine 1 [running]: git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc/lib/ui.(*Context).Printf(0xc0002fa450, 0x2, 0x1, 0x0, 0x84de7f, 0x4, 0xc0000d3c98, 0x1, 0x1, 0x50) ... I just installed it on Fedora 30 and got that when trying to setup an account.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  Try using a bigger terminal emulator. There's a ticket to deal with too-small terminals more elegantly but it hasn't been done yet.
vjr 7y ago
I miss pine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_%28email_client%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_%28email_client%29
- msbarnett 7y ago
  It’s still around: https://repo.or.cz/alpine.git https://repo.or.cz/alpine.git
  - twic 7y ago
    I've been using it (Pine, the Alpine) as my primary mail client since 1998. Months after i started using it, someone suggested i try mutt. I'm definitely going to, but i haven't got round to it yet.
- cyberjunkie 7y ago
  Oh, I used this back in the mid-90s and it was SO good!
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    If you liked Pine you will probably like Alpine and Pico's successor, Nano. What is the problem with Mutt though? Does Aerc have color or themeing support? Does it have a seperate daemon to talk the email protocols such as IMAP4?
    - cyberjunkie 7y ago
      I am a Nano user! Very happy. Vim users be hatin~
    - c-cube 7y ago
      mutt is single threaded, for a start.
- rsync 7y ago
  I use pine (alpine) as my primary (and only) mailtool - and have since 1993. Further, all rsync.net employees use pine for all rsync.net email. One interesting side-effect of this is that employee to employee emails are simply a local copy operation - they never traverse a network. If you're looking into a mailtool that can run in the terminal (like this, or like mutt or (al)pine) I encourage you to consider running that mailtool on the actual machine with your mailspool. It allows your email to show up in your INBOX immediately and, as described above, allows for email interactions that don't leave the server ...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
manjana 7y ago
Dont really see the need for a new email client, we already got Mutt, sup, alpine and a few others.
Tharkun 7y ago
Off-topic, but damn, Drew, how do you manage to be so productive? Sway alone is an impressive beast (and the only thing that got me off my awesomewm addiction). Now you're throwing in an impressive mutt alternative? Thanks for all the hard work!
- suprfnk 7y ago
  [–]drewdevault[S] 26 points 17 hours ago I work on free software full-time now thanks to the support of the many people who donate to my work :) https://drewdevault.com/2019/01/15/Im-doing-FOSS-full-time.html* https://drewdevault.com/2019/01/15/Im-doing-FOSS-full-time.h... Lots of people help with these projects, too. aerc 0.1.0 includes contributions from a total of 16 authors. From: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bwao4d/aerc_an_email_client_for_your_terminal/epwnx9p/?st=jwhohuww&sh=37d10be2 https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bwao4d/aerc_an_email...
chrismorgan 7y ago
In the video, it seems to be being pronounced “arc”. This is unfortunately confusable with a widely-deployed email authentication standard, ARC (http://arc-spec.org/ http://arc-spec.org/). I suggest contemplating at least a different pronunciation (even without changing the name, the spelling is open to about four pronunciations of varying obscurity and cumbersomeness—none of which particularly suggest the spelling “aerc” when heard, I may add).
Naac 7y ago
For those of you already using emacs, this mirrors my workflow in mu4e. Here are some screenshots[0], and here is a guide on how to set up mu4e[1]. [0] https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html [1] http://cachestocaches.com/2017/3/complete-guide-email-emacs-using-mu-and-/ http://cachestocaches.com/2017/3/complete-guide-email-emacs-...
- ernst_klim 7y ago
  My main concern with mu4e is that I have to fetch all the emails on my local machine. That's terrible, hope one day there will be a mu4e-like client for emacs with a thunderbird-like workflow, aka fetch in a lazy manner, before reading.
  - meitham 7y ago
    I am the opposite of you, I prefer all my email to be avaialble offline to me. I use offlineimap to mirror my remote IMAP folders, and usually read them with mutt, but occasinaly read them in GUI emacs where the terminal does not support RTL, such as Arabic emails.
    - ernst_klim 7y ago
      >I am the opposite of you, I prefer all my email to be avaialble offline to me. Even spam or mails you want to delete before reading? There are dozens of mails I want to delete or put to the archive folder before reading, thus this feature is annoying me. And when I want to backup mail, I use offlineimap explicitly. Besides, I use mu4e of 3 separate machines, and on each I have to keep a local copy of all my mails, even mails I've read already.
      - meitham 7y ago
        I selectively choose which IMAP dirs to sync. ``Spam`` isn't one of them. I do however sync my ``Archive`` or ``ALLAMIL`` dir as I often need to quickly grep (notmuch) for messages wihout having network connectivity.
drejay 7y ago
Should you need the services of a good hacker, talk to darkcracker@protonmail.com. Dude is good.
bojanvidanovic 7y ago
That looks promising! I wish Mutt had a mail account configurator like the one in Aerc. Definitely giving it a try.
bronzecarnage 7y ago
Great work! I'm looking forward to using it full time. A couple of quick comments. 1. It doesn't seem to work with when $TERM is set to some non-default setting. (panic: terminal entry not found) 2. When term is forced to xterm-256-color, aerc crashes when the window is resized.
skrebbel 7y ago
Is Sir_Cmpwn a person or a committee? How can one person produce so much decent software?
- hazbo 7y ago
  I was thinking exactly this. It's unbelievable the amount of amazing things Drew has been putting out there recently.
- eterps 7y ago
  @Sir_Cmpwn do you have some insights to share on this? What are the conditions that make you most productive, and what conditions make you the least productive?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
    I get a lot of help. Fostering a healthy and happy community of contributors in each of my projects is extremely important to me. I'm also able to be more productive myself thanks to the support of hundreds of people who donate to my work or buy a sourcehut subscription, which allows me to work on free software full time.
    - theWheez 7y ago
      Any advice or insights on creating and fostering that community for your projects?
      - ddevault 7y ago
        https://drewdevault.com/2018/06/01/How-I-maintain-FOSS-projects.html https://drewdevault.com/2018/06/01/How-I-maintain-FOSS-proje...
        theWheez 7y ago
        Perfect! Thank you :)
meehow 7y ago
What a beautiful code! It's not that common nowadays.
marttt 7y ago
Nice, looking forward to trying it out. Other similar projects worth mentioning: https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze - As the author says, "Unix utilities to deal with maildir". https://github.com/aligrudi/neatmail https://github.com/aligrudi/neatmail - A noninteractive client with ex-like commands http://plan9.stanleylieber.com/mother/ http://plan9.stanleylieber.com/mother/ - for Plan9 people.
necovek 7y ago
I find it funny that the first thing on their web site for a text-mode email client is a video screencast: as someone who likes spending time in text interfaces (terminal or emacs), it's exactly for the reasons videos are bad. You can't skip-through videos to get to the part you care about which is obvious in a textual format (and it's obvious if it's even there). You can't copy and paste stuff. You usually have to have sound on to understand what's going on. Sorry for ranting a bit about this modern tendency to record videos instead of write text :)
arnoooooo 7y ago
This is pretty awesome. I see only two things missing : - a way to have all accounts in the same tab, with a unified inbox - threading support, ideally with folding
- lucb1e 7y ago
  For what it's worth, I would want neither of those and would turn them off if they existed.
epse 7y ago
Is there any way to add a new folder from aerc? I'm loving it (besides a bug with reddit emails) but that's a major bummer (as well as no manual "refresh" option)
notinventedhear 7y ago
Very excited by the prospect of a modern terminal-mail client that is easier to use! After following the README: this is clearly not ready/designed for wide consumption - the recipe neglects to mention how to install a custom doc-tool called scdoc (by the same author?) that is required to build it - and there are no pre-built binaries (that I can see).
- gbear605 7y ago
  It’s still version 0.1
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  Most Linux distros already have scdoc available: https://repology.org/project/scdoc/badges https://repology.org/project/scdoc/badges It's not designed to be installed from pre-built binaries. It requires some other stuff to be set up on your system, too. It's designed to be friendly for distros to package instead. If you want to install it from source, use the Makefile like everything else.
augustk 7y ago
What I miss is a low-resource email client with a GUI, something I (in principle) can run on a 20 year old computer.
- 3xblah 7y ago
  https://www.nakka.com/soft/npop/index_eng.html https://www.nakka.com/soft/npop/index_eng.html
- Yetanfou 7y ago
  Try claws or sylpheed (from which claws is derived), these work just fine on older hardware. Startup time (with cold cache) on my 14yo T42p is under a second, RSS is 48MB with 4 active multi-gigabyte IMAP accounts. There is a bunch of extensions to add PGP integration etc. On Debian the package is called 'claws-mail', this name might be different elsewhere.
- smhenderson 7y ago
  Have you ever tried Claws[1]? I haven't used it for a while but when I did I was able to use it on quite older hardware running trimmed down versions of various Linux and BSD boxes. Besides being light weight it's got some good features for an older client, it's GPL and can use plug-ins for extra functionality. Nothing to do with he project, just a previously happy user. [1] https://www.claws-mail.org/ https://www.claws-mail.org/
- hvsdjksj 7y ago
  I'm still using the last version (12.16) of the original Opera browser for its integrated email client. It has everything you may need (POP3, IMAP, HTML editor, threaded view, labels, multiple accounts, etc., etc.), it works wonderfully on Linux, and on old, low memory machines too.
mukundmr 7y ago
Crashed on first email I read from Gmail. Also, I had to enable "less secure access" in Gmail for aerc to work. Will try again after a few months.
- andrewchambers 7y ago
  'Less secure' access is a choice by google to lock people onto gmail, they choose not to implement random device specific passwords. Better to avoid gmail.
  - mjlee 7y ago
    How does it lock you in to gmail? They provide a method by which you can use any mail client if you'd like. Applications can always implement OAuth 2.0, which is pretty open (and is what you'll need to do for other mail providers, not just gmail.)
    - andrewchambers 7y ago
      They took something that worked fine, then broke it after they had the majority of users. There are backwards compatible and secure methods (Like allowing a unique password per device). It is an obvious tactic to force people to choose between gmail web client, and outlook/thunderbird/aerc. To make matters worse they falsely point the blame at competitors and then people like you defend them.
- minusf 7y ago
  "less secure" nonsense is required for mutt as well.
major505 7y ago
Thats neat. I aways wanted an text only email clientem easier to use than alpine and mutt. This on seens usable out of the box. I will take a look.
laktak 7y ago
https://github.com/ddevault/aerc https://github.com/ddevault/aerc > This repository is abandoned in favor of ongoing development on git.sr.ht. The codebase has been rewritten in Go and is much more stable and useful than what you see here. @Sir_Cmpwn what's the advantage of git.sr.ht over github?
- matoro 7y ago
  That's his own site that he built himself. It runs a ton of services, bug trackers, CI, mailing lists, wikis, etc. https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/
- ddevault 7y ago
  SourceHut is my own platform: https://sourcehut.org https://sourcehut.org It's entirely open source (unlike GitHub), has its own CI, and is mailing list oriented instead of PR oriented.
- gbear605 7y ago
  For one, he’s the lead dev on gir.sr.hr. In terms of general benefits: email workflow is a big one for those that like it, it’s open source, no javascript, no tracking, and built in continuous integration and mailing lists.
amiga_500 7y ago
How is this any improvement over mutt? I can use mutt with emacsclient as my editor, in tmux.
- zurn 7y ago
  Mutt IMAP is unusable on a laptop since it hangs and loses changes (eg read/unread status) when the IMAP connection flaps.
  - amiga_500 7y ago
    I've used it for years and never had this.
- Leace 7y ago
  Some parts of mutt look like unmaintained and on life-support. I've seen the GPG interface code and it's full of deprecated code (e.g. PKA support) or subtle bugs.
pge 7y ago
I used mutt+offlineimap for a few years, with a corporate account on an MSExchange Server and the two biggest issues I had (which I hope Aerc addresses) were: * no good way to search/auto-complete addresses (I used vdirsyncer which got me the address book locally but there was no easy way to fill-in addresses when typing an email). * no way to accept calendar requests - I would pull them up on my phone to accept or reject. Otherwise, everything worked quite well, but those issues annoying enough that I eventually switched back to a Windows machine with Outlook. The Email+Calendar+Addressbook integration may violate the Linux philosophy of doing one thing well, but for today's typical office workflow it is frustrating not to have a platform with all three integrated.
- btreecat 7y ago
  You might be interested in dav mail. http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ I have it setup so I can use thunderbird for all my exchange interaction (except group management).
  - pge 7y ago
    Thanks - I was actually using Davmail but at the time it did not have the address book and calendar integration, and I had not checked up on it ina few years. Looks like it has gotten more features since then. I may have to give mutt another try...:)
sandreas 7y ago
Good job. Markdown support for sending html-Mails would be very nice ;)
nwmcsween 7y ago
Hmm why not mblaze[0] over aerc? [0] https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze
yayitsreallyme 7y ago
This is great! More email clients are always welcomed. :)
alpaca128 7y ago
I just tried it and I love it! Mutt could never convince me because the configuration seemed overly complicated and I didn't like the controls. Now maybe I'm just blind but I can't see a way to highlight unread emails in any way. Once I can get this working I'll switch in a heartbeat.

722 points by jcamou 7y ago

paulhilbert 7y ago

Is there any way I can see the name of attached files?

drejay 7y ago

Should you need a good hacker, talk to darkcracker@protonmail.com

pmoriarty 7y ago

I have to be skeptical of any email client that's not integrated in to Emacs.

craftyguy 7y ago
As someone who doesn't want to completely throw away their workflow and muscle memory, I consider that a feature.
Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
What about integrating emacs into aerc? You can set your EDITOR to emacs and replace aerc's default keybindings with a more emacs-inspired set. Send me your binds.conf and I'll add it to contrib in case anyone else wants an emacs-esque setup, too!
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  "You can set your EDITOR to emacs and replace aerc's default keybindings with a more emacs-inspired set." I appreciate the suggestion, but unfortunately that's not even remotely adequate. By integration I mean exposing every single function and UI element of the client to Emacs, so that they can be bound, wrapped and extended as needed. Ideally, these functions would be written in eLisp, so they themselves could be modified and customized to taste while leveraging the enormous Emacs eLisp ecosystem. Emacs email clients have this sort of integration, and it is what gives them tremendous flexibility and power.
  - ddevault 7y ago
    I'm not ignorant of how emacs works - I was just giving you a cheeky response to your cheeky comment.
    - microcolonel 7y ago
      You can also say that Gnus is slow, if you want to be extra cheeky. As currently configured, opening gnus on my (admittedly a bit large) Maildir takes more than an hour (no, really, I'm not joking); of course, once it's up I dare not close it, and that works out fine for me.
      - BeetleB 7y ago
        >You can also say that Gnus is slow, if you want to be extra cheeky. gnus is not the only way to do email in Emacs. IME, it is the most bloated way to do it. While I didn't like the tone of the person's comment, I do sympathize with him. I used various email programs (pine, mutt, Thunderbird, etc) for years - but all of them seemed to lack something, and the effort to add my desired features was too high. With Emacs, the barrier to customize my workflow is a lot lower. Now that I've been using Emacs + notmuch for mail for the last few years, it's really hard to motivate myself to try anything outside Emacs, and the feeling is much worse when it's something cool like this. I even haven't bothered with alot, although it is notmuch based. I mean, is it trivial for me to make an Org mode TODO linking to an email while in alot?
  - cweagans 7y ago
    If you want this level of integration with emacs, it seems like an emacs mail client would be better suited for your workflow...
ncmncm 7y ago
Every interactive program evolves until it contains Emacs. Even Emacs.
- hestefisk 7y ago
  With that kind of meta recursion, we need to make Emacs part of the Emacs acronym itself.
  - ashton314 7y ago
    Emacs Makes All Computers Superb

0vermorrow 7y ago

Love the idea, and I really will give this a go as a daily driver. Just a small feedback: I had trouble with one of the requirements -> scdoc, didn't know what exactly that is (Googling didn't help), so might be worth to provide a direct link in the README.md to https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc/ https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc/

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
scdoc is probably available in your Linux distro's package manager, and aerc is designed to be packager-friendly - so eventually the idea is that most users will apt install aerc, rather than build it themselves.
- 0vermorrow 7y ago
  Yeah, the problem is I am on OSX, and I actually had to compile scdoc myself without the -static flag (missing libraries). Also, I had to run it as: TERM=xterm-256color aerc On OSX, otherwise got: panic: terminal entry not found
  - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
    This issue comes from tcell, which has a baked-in terminfo database. I'm also not sure about the state of the terminfo database in general on OSX... in any case, I plan on improving terminfo support in tcell at some point.
    - 0vermorrow 7y ago
      It's probably because i use xterm-kitty. Awesome work on aerc, looking forward for continued development.
      - kabacha 7y ago
        Can confirm, am running Kitty too and ran into exact same error messages, exporting different TERM environment variable did fix this though!

ncmncm 7y ago

I saw the title [was: "World's Best Email Client"] and thought, "yeah, sure". But WOW. It's the e-mail of my dreams. Take my money, damn you! EDIT: I may have been seduced by the clicky keyboard noises in the video. But no! Is good! EDIT2: I forgive you for Wayland.

ncmncm 7y ago
I notice aerc is not on the list of projects to donate for...
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  Whoops, it is now!

GlenTheMachine 7y ago

Exchange compatibility? Asking for a friend;)

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/clients/pop3-and-imap4/configure-imap4?view=exchserver-2019 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/clients/pop3-and-i... I have no interest in first-class exchange support upstream.
craftyguy 7y ago
Can exchange do IMAP?
- edoceo 7y ago
  Yes
  - craftyguy 7y ago
    Then it 'supports' exchange. \o/
    - GlenTheMachine 7y ago
      It can but whether it does depends on your local IT. Which means it doesn't.

ryjo 7y ago

I can tell from the video that the interface is quite easy to navigate if you're a vim user. Very impressive work!

Avamander 7y ago

How's the UTF-8 e-mail address support? As most clients suck so bad at that it would be awesome to have an alternative. How's the GPG and S/MIME support? We'd really need an e-mail client that has first class support of both. Current solutions I've tried are cumbersome at best. Having those two it'd actually be the best e-mail client for me.

jgalt212 7y ago
> UTF-8 e-mail address support? hard pass on this as it encourages dark patterns.
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  You mean like speaking any other language besides english?
  - danielscrubs 7y ago
    I think he is thinking about that some letters look identical but are encoded differently. So someone will not be able to look at an email address and say: oh it’s from such and such.
    - Arkanosis 7y ago
      Trusting one's eyes is doomed to failure anyway. That's what PGP is for.
    - Avamander 7y ago
      That's a side-effect of UTF-8, yes, but my primary concern was indeed non-English e-mail addresses, people should have the right to use their own names. You have GPG for identity validation though.
      - jgalt212 7y ago
        good luck getting your mom to implement that.

megous 7y ago

It can't do maildir. I tried mdir:/// maildir:/// file:/// and /. grep -R maildir of the code returns nothing. So I guess, using it on local mail is a no go. Sad. I tried it only because this was advertised, only to be disappointed. It's better to not advertise features you don't have. Or at least state what features you have instead of mixing what you have and have not into a feature list at random. It's also far cry from the configurability of the mutt/neomutt. But that can change. It would certainly be nice to have a properly scriptable terminal based MUA, as neomutt, while nice, and flexible, is kind of hard to configure.

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
There's a big red disclaimer on this page that says the feature list is a bit wishful, and the latest version is only 0.1.0. The docs (man pages, start with man aerc) only document implemented features, you may want to start there. Here's the ticket for maildir support: https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/16 https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/16 Several people have expressed interest in working on this, I expect we'll see it for 0.2.0. As far as configurability is concerned, yeah, the plan is to continue making it more customizable and configurable. Stuff like filters already afford you a lot of options today. At some point I might also be interested in adding a fifo you can use to feed commands into it from a script, too, for turing-complete customization.
- megous 7y ago
  Yeah, I read it, assumming that easier features would be implemented first. I still think it's better to split the list into what is completed and roadmap. It would help me track the progress. Anyway, good luck. I'll keep my eye on the project, because it certainly seems interesting.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
    I don't believe on implementing the easy features first. If you implement the hard features first, its smooth sailing for the rest of the project! If you would like to keep track of specific features, check out the bug tracker: https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2 https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2

kkotak 7y ago

lol!

russellbeattie 7y ago

My least favorite email begins with a +Russell at the top, meaning that there's been a long email thread that I haven't been a part of, and now I've been pulled in. The text below that is your standard mess of email text: 1) It's in reverse chronological order starting at the bottom. 2) Each message has 4 or 5 lines of "to", "from", "cc", "subject" and "date" in between. 3) Previous messages might or might not be repeated by other email clients 4) All with varying levels of indenting. This has to be a common problem. Are there any libraries, projects, email clients or scripts to help parse it all into something readable? I've looked and haven't found zip. I know Slack is the new hotness, but for the rest of us stuck in email, this is a daily hell. The progress of email clients basically stopped in the mid-2000s. I swear, the first email client that actually solves this problem will be the next billion dollar business.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
The solution is to have the thread forwarded as message/rfc822 attachments instead of full quote madness.
- russellbeattie 7y ago
  This is definitely already a solved problem - for open or homogeneous platforms. This is why it's still an issue for everyone else... Microsoft's general attitude is, "everyone should use Outlook", Apple wants you to use Mail, Google wants everyone on Gmail, etc. I'm sure this is rarely an issue inside those companies - threading "just works" since coworkers all use the same clients. So not only do they have zero financial reason to support interop or openness, they probably don't even know its an issue.

keyle 7y ago

It's good to know that the world's best email client is still a work in progress.

cweagans 7y ago

I dunno what it is about the screencast, but it takes _forever_ to load. Any chance you could upload to Youtube or something so that I can actually watch the thing? EDIT: I'm getting about 20kb/s download from sr.ht where the video is hosted. Definitely not an issue with my connection, as I can download other files right now at 2Mb/s.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
microdrum 7y ago
Agree. Can he throw it on Streamable or something? EDIT: Here it is: https://streamable.com/3ysv9 https://streamable.com/3ysv9
dcbadacd 7y ago
Native player in Chrome doesn't seem to download videos in big enough chunks or doesn't buffer well enough for smooth playback in some cases. I've seen it several times myself.

elagost 7y ago

I'd leave Thunderbird in a heartbeat if I could find a contact/calendar syncing terminal client as well. Any recommendations?

cik 7y ago
I currently use Thunderbird for mail, and MineTime for calendar. I found the Thunderbird calendar integrations (5 calendars) way too flaky.
- krzyk 7y ago
  Would be good to have a calendar client in terminal. MineTime looks cool, but I got a wrong feeling about the looks and yeah, scrolling down and I saw it: "MineTime is a calendar built on Electron". Nah, I prefer to have just one browser open (and not Chrome/Chromium).
benoliver999 7y ago
I use Khard for contacts and khal for calendar. Neither handle syncing, so I use vdirsyncer for that (you can use anything you like or just go local only). https://github.com/scheibler/khard https://github.com/scheibler/khard https://github.com/pimutils/khal https://github.com/pimutils/khal https://github.com/pimutils/vdirsyncer https://github.com/pimutils/vdirsyncer
Allamann 7y ago
Have a look at vdirsyncer, khard, and khal. This in combination with mbsyc is my CLI PIM sync :)

carimura 7y ago

You did it! Congratulations! World's best email client! Great job, everybody!

throwaway_x13zd 7y ago

Thank you Sir_Cmpwn, awesome that someone is picking up where mutt left off.

stevekemp 7y ago
My attempt was https://lumail.org/ https://lumail.org/ a console-based mail-client inspired by mutt, but with 100% lua scripting.

anarazel 7y ago

Looks interesting! Based on a quick stroll through the source code, I don't see any search integration. Is that correct? I guess I could just shell out to notmuch? But I do find virtual folders for searches really convenient. Currently using neomutt with notmuch support, over a Maildir (which in turn is separately synced via IMAP using mbsync). Not having all the context vanish ala mutt would sure be nice.

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
There's a ticket planned for adding a notmuch backend straight up: https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/105 https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/105 No indirection through mbsync & maildir. This shouldn't be terribly hard - if you're interested in working on this feature, swing by the IRC channel to get a rundown of the technical details. There's also a ticket for search in general: https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/93 https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/93 Which will probably be implemented for IMAP by 0.2.0.
- anarazel 7y ago
  Thanks for the references! I personally work offline for a fair bit (personally more productive that way, and I'm also traveling plenty for work). So I kinda like the mbsync & maildir indirection (although I do hate the lack of NOTIFY, and some other imap inefficiencies around not supporting QRESYNC etc).
- em-bee 7y ago
  i am looking forward to this. i am currently using supmua, the ancestor of notmuch, and i haven't been able to switch to any other notmuch based terminal client because their interfaces all felt inferior to sup. aerc is the first client i see that does the interface with multiple switchable screens right from the start. notmuch integration with the ability to keep virtual folders based on tags and on searches is the only thing keeping me from trying out aerc right now. i'll be keeping an eye on it.
  - rakoo 7y ago

goerz 7y ago

How does this compare to mutt?

megous 7y ago
Mutt/Neomutt is much more mature and has more features and better performance. (fantastic threads support, fast and very flexible filtering, etc.) Aerc is very new and written in Go. I tested it on my 100 thousnand mail ARM linux mailing list archive, accessed via localhost dovecot IMAP server, to see the best case performance, but it doesn't look good, atm. It looks like this when I scroll through the archive: https://megous.com/dl/tmp/cjitwkaxpsypgcfdvncr.mp4 https://megous.com/dl/tmp/cjitwkaxpsypgcfdvncr.mp4 It's not really comparable to mutt, yet. The performance is slow, and it doesn't support threads, which is a must for MUA.
- ddevault 7y ago
  aerc doesn't download all of your message headers upfront - mutt does. All that time you spend waiting for mutt to open your inbox is downloading all of the data that aerc is downloading as you scroll. Also, you can scroll faster with ^d/^u, half a page at a time, or pgup/pgdown, for a full page at a time. Yes, aerc is not yet as featureful or mature as mutt, but it definitely does not have inferior performance.
  - megous 7y ago
    I use POP3, and only wait for mutt when changing to a folder (4s/100k mails). Then everything is basically instantaneous. But yeah, I don't know about mutt IMAP performance, as I never used it. I've only configured a local IMAP server over my maildir to be able to try aerc. I have no clue why aerc is taking 100-200ms to load a single message (as you see in the video) from the localhost. Maybe naggle (is it even used on localhost)? Also, I'm not sure how you'd make threads work while loading message list only partially. So full load of the message list is needed anyway (at least once and cache it locally). It's not some failing. I want thread that started 5 months ago to pop forward if new message is posted to it. EDIT: Faster scrolling loads multiple messages at once faster. Maybe aerc can take into account that user may have scrolled past more than one message in the time the previous message finished loading.

badosu 7y ago

Pretty amazing! Some observations: - Attachments that don't have a filter can't be visualized. For this case would be interesting to open with 'xdg-open' when hit <Enter>, and/or '.mailcap' support. - Account password is stored in plaintext - Occasional rendering artifacts when switching tabs/folders If those above are fixed plus theming, unread, etc. I can easily see myself using it as my daily driver.

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
>Attachments that don't have a filter can't be visualized You can use :save or :pipe on these, but yeah - xdg-open would also be cool. Mailcap support would also be great. >Account password is stored in plaintext In a chmod 600 file, though. There's also an option for configuring a command to run to retrieve your password by e.g. decrypting it with gpg: see aerc-imap(5), or :help imap, for details.
- badosu 7y ago
  It seems ':pipe' sends the data to stdin, I was trying to see a pdf file and the programs I tried (evince, mupdf) do not seem to support this (or perhaps usage is different?). Seems like a good patch to implement a command that saves to a temporary file and opens with provided program, will certainly follow development, great work!
  - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
    https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/125 https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/125 :)

microcolonel 7y ago

Gnus has been great for me, but after about 40k+ (I stopped looking at the counts actually) messages in my Maildir, performance suffers for me (that is, if I start gnus from scratch it takes more than an hour and a half to open, with my entire Maildir in the page cache, and a huge amount of extremely fast memory). Notmuch doesn't seem to help at all, or if it would, it's hard to tell if it's configured correctly.

cjbprime 7y ago
That's a little odd -- I was using gnus with maildirs that size ten years ago and it wasn't so bad. nnmaildir backend for gnus, right? I remember something about increasing the emacs memory limit before garbage collection kicks in, too.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  > I remember something about increasing the emacs memory limit before garbage collection kicks in, too. That seems interesting, I'll look at that. If there's one thing I have, it is a lot of memory. I would be okay if my whole Maildir was mmapped, as long as that made gnus faster.
  - egh 7y ago
    (I have used Wanderlust on emacs for about 15 years now.) I think using maildir directly may be hard to squeeze good performance out of with emacs. I'd suggest trying the alternatives: for eample, IMAP with ~30k messages should work decently in Wanderlust (and I would assume gnus), though initial load is slow (way less than hours, though). Using mu (maildir utils) via search in wanderlust to load 30k messages take about 1 minute, but if you are using mu you should be searching, not loading an entire mailbox. So there are probably some options out there, but I'd avoid loading 40k messages from a maildir directly.
csomar 7y ago
40k email? That sounds too much if it is for a single person. If you get 10 email per days for 10 years, you'd not get to 40k (35.6k). My suggestion will be to clean your mailbox instead of finding a new client.

euske 7y ago

I wonder how good it is with wide width characters (in CJK languages). Handling them in a terminal is rather tricky, and I haven't seen anything that's good except ones that are developed by the actual users of the language.

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
aerc dev here. I am a fluent speaker of Japanese and frequently work with CJK characters in the client.
manjana 7y ago
I also think it is really only your terminal and fonts that have a say at how wide characters are handled (as well as Xresources if you run GNU/Linux). If you are on Linux a modern terminal emulator with great capabilities is kovidgoyal/kitty at Github.

sikhnerd 7y ago

Very cool! How does this compare to sup / mutt / alpine / astroid ?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sulfastor 7y ago

Doesn't work on Terminator.

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
Set TERM=xterm and try again. tcell (the library aerc uses to render its UI) has a really annoying built-in terminfo database, which at some point I plan on fixing myself.

inetknght 7y ago

Hmmm, I'm not familiar with command line email clients but this looks cool. I wonder if I can use aerc in a bash pipeline? Say, to pipe email content from/to gpg?

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
You can't pipe emails into aerc (yet?), but you can definitely pipe emails out of aerc. The :pipe command is bound to | by default, so you can type, for example, |gpg --decrypt | less<Enter>.

cjbprime 7y ago

Neat! I used to be a kernel maintainer, and had a similar setup going inside emacs with gnus, and dvc-git commands bound to keys to apply patches. Here's an old blog post about some of it: https://blog.printf.net/articles/2010/10/04/git-patches-in-gnus/ https://blog.printf.net/articles/2010/10/04/git-patches-in-g... Gnus was too slow, but worse, emacs is single-threaded, so e.g. polling for new mail in the background blocked the rest of the editor while it happened. I never understood why it was impossible to have any kind of multithreading in emacs.

ddevault 7y ago
Hey, would you mind writing up some details about your email setup for kernel work to sir@cmpwn.com? I'd like to understand more email-driven workflows, especially from kernel maintainers, to guide aerc's design.
- cjbprime 7y ago
  Hm! I can't think of much to add, except.. the next thing I would've worked on might've been to integrate a client for https://patchwork.kernel.org/ https://patchwork.kernel.org/ to keep it in sync and mark patches there as handled.
  - ddevault 7y ago
    Thanks! I wonder if you've seen my work with mailing lists on sourcehut, by the way? https://sourcehut.org https://sourcehut.org I'm working on a replacement for patchwork. Here's an example of a thread which was rendered with my tool, which is just generated from organic mail threads without extra human intervention: https://lists.sr.ht/~philmd/qemu/patches/5556 https://lists.sr.ht/~philmd/qemu/patches/5556 If you have more feedback or thoughts around this, I'd love to hear it too :)
  - ajdlinux 7y ago
    A Patchwork client (well, a tool that does some of the more useful patchwork status updating, it's not a full client as such) for notmuch, which has a number of kernel dev users: https://github.com/stewart-ibm/pwnm-sync https://github.com/stewart-ibm/pwnm-sync

chrissnell 7y ago

I really, really like that the editor is embedded within the mail client. The need to shell out to vim or whatever is what always kept me from using Mutt, despite loving its UI. aerc isn't quite as colorful or well-laid-out as Mutt but this is very promising. This reminds me a lot of my all-time favorite mail editor, which I miss dearly: GoldED [0] [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoldED https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoldED [1] https://blog.onlime.ru/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CwkTcNSWQAAeOq0.jpg https://blog.onlime.ru/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CwkTcNSWQA... (Russian screenshot but you get the idea)

fouc 7y ago
Some color would be nice. (I quite like Irssi's color scheme)
- Fnoord 7y ago
  > (I quite like Irssi's color scheme) Irssi's default color scheme which, incidentally, is the same as Mutt's default. Both can be changed. For example, to a solarized color scheme.

Aloha 7y ago

Any chance one could convince you to also support nano as a editor option?

ddevault 7y ago
Just set EDITOR=nano in your environment, or add it to your aerc.conf. It already works :)

sulfastor 7y ago

Why account passwords are stored on plaintext after the wizard? How do you encrypt them while configuring?

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
man aerc-imap for details, you can specify an external command to run. The creds file is chmod 600, and most other email clients (e.g. thunderbird) are also storing your creds in plaintext - it's just less obvious cause they put them in sqlite or something.
necovek 7y ago
Unless you are willing to provide a decryption key on every "check my email" call (eg. every 5 minutes), an email client (or well, anything requiring frequent reauthorization) virtually has to have it in "plain text" (or any obfuscated form which is equivalent to plain text). Workable alternatives are to store the decryption key in memory for the runtime of the program (eg. using login keyrings or per-app logic). If you encrypt your $HOME or your entire disk, storing it in plain text achieves roughly the same level of protection (eg. decryption key is in the memory).

tzs 7y ago

How easy is it to tell it what IMAP folders to use for sent mail, deleted mail, and drafts? A while back, I engaged in epic combat against Apple Mail on my Mac, Apple's iOS mail app on my iPhone, Outlook on my Mac, Outlook on my gaming PC, Outlook on my Surface Pro 4, and Thunderbird on my Mac to banish the blight of, e.g., Sent, Sent Mail, and Sent Messages, and similar for drafts and deleted. It was an epic struggle, but I finally got them to all agree on Sent, Trash, Drafts (and Junk for spam). I'm not going near any other email client now without being sure I can tell it to use those before I let it have access to my IMAP.

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
Easy, you can change what folder it treats as sent. It doesn't have a trash bin (and it won't) or draft support (and it will) yet.
- mbreese 7y ago
  Out of curiosity, why won’t there be a Trash bin? What about an Archive folder?
  - epse 7y ago
    You can just make an archive folder and copy emails there, or set up a shortcut to archive emails.
  - brokenkebab 7y ago
    Trash bin (for messages, or files) is a poor man's replacement for making backup copies.
    - x3ro 7y ago
      I think that's an oversimplification.. let's say I have daily backups. Let's also say I'm opening my email client in the morning and receive 20 mails, but because I haven't had any coffee yet I accidentally delete the wrong one, which I realize 15 seconds later. Now that mail is gone and I have no way to retrieve it.. (No, paying more attention is not a solution. People inevitably make these kinds of mistakes)

bayareanative 7y ago

Does anyone use alpine?

tramtrist 7y ago
Yes, and it works so well that I cannot imagine what the benefits of Aerc could have over it. I guess I'll have to do a comparison !
clort 7y ago
Yes and my muscle memory goes back a long way.. I like some of the stated features on the webpage though, Aerc seems like something to keep an eye on.

tobias2014 7y ago

What about full text search? This feature has brought me to from mutt to sup to alot: https://alot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://alot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

ddevault 7y ago
notmuch support is planned! It shouldn't be too hard, if an interested user were to take ownership over the feature it could probably ship in 0.2.0. Want to help?
- hu3 7y ago
  Since the client is written in Go, I believe this could be easily done with https://blevesearch.com https://blevesearch.com
  - ddevault 7y ago
    Eh, I would rather use notmuch than develop my own index from scratch. Keep it email, yo.
- e12e 7y ago
  Curious if you've looked at nmh and mu (maildir utils)? The last time I looked, it wasn't obvious that notmuch was the better option. And also if you've looked at jmap? It's my distinct impression that the jmap effort isn't a case of nih, but rather stems from a real need of avoiding imap limitations (in idle, various levels of extension support). One of my project ideas, for a long time, has been to figure out if dbmail might be tricked into being a decent jmap server via a graphql(like) proxy on top of postgres...

dllthomas 7y ago

As another point in the space, have you looked at nmh? https://www.nongnu.org/nmh/ https://www.nongnu.org/nmh/

shereadsthenews 7y ago

Is it groundbreaking to display mail with an external pager or to pipe it to filters? These were/are core features of elm, from 1986.

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
IMO the key innovation is that aerc does it with an embedded terminal emulator, tmux-style. This allows you to keep using the client for other things while reading or composing emails.
- shereadsthenews 7y ago
  That is interesting and different. I guess I am accustomed to the "unix way": I use screen to multiplex my terminal and I have no bad problems from running multiple instances of mutt on the same maildir.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
    That workflow to me seems like more of a hack begging to be improved than a comfortable daily driver. I've never had a problem running mulitple instances of mutt, either - and I run multiple instances of aerc sometimes, actually - but since aerc has ownership over your emails and mail accounts it only makes sense to me that it would multiplex them for you.
    - zokier 7y ago
      I'd argue that the aerc approach is also bit of hack[1], but ultimately it mostly boils down to the limitations of terminals; to have "sub-windows", you need to implement basically a whole windowing system and terminal emulation layer. Makes me think what would email client designed for and integrated with tmux look like, i.e. the client would open new tmux panes for editors etc. [1] don't take that as a hard criticism, I happen to think lot of things, especially around terminals, being hacks.
      - 7y ago

ilovecaching 7y ago

What the TL;DR; difference between Aerc and mutt?

fiatjaf 7y ago
Watch the video. Aerc is usable.
- ilovecaching 7y ago
  I currently use mutt and have no problems with it, what's the issue?
  - fiatjaf 7y ago
    You don't want to hear, but I tried to use mutt with Gmail.

rlue 7y ago

I haven't dug too deep into the features or how this works yet, but it's very exciting to see any kind of movement in this space at all. I've spent a lot of time configuring mutt just the way I like it, but I'd throw it all away in a heartbeat for a good, modern alternative. My wishlist: * A daemon that pulls new mail from my IMAP servers to my local maildir as soon as it arrives. (I know mutt has an IMAP mode, and it looks like that's aerc's primary mode of operation, too, but I like to have a local copy of my entire mail archive.) * Rendering plain text markdown into multipart/html emails. I love me some plaintext, but no one else in my life even knows what a terminal is. 80-char lines are too short for desktop displays and too long for small phones (leading to awful linebreaks), which makes me the guy whose emails never look right.

stevekemp 7y ago
I came up with my own mutt-alike, written with Lua for real scripting. Sadly it seems these projects are pretty niche, they're also damn hard to write. I spent a lot of time fighting with malformed MIME messages, etc. Then adding on GPG-support, and handling the UI, all becomes a huge time-sync. Still I now have a client that I love, even if nobody else does! https://lumail.org/ https://lumail.org/
- tonyarkles 7y ago
  > malformed MIME My god. I tried parsing my gmail “All Messages” once as part of a project. It ended up being an amazing corpus of a zillion ways to do MIME wrong. Project didn’t get off the ground because even after handling all of my weird cases, every new user ended up blowing up the parser again. Yeesh.
- marmaduke 7y ago
  Doesn’t claws have a reusable library for that sort of thing?
u801e 7y ago
> 80-char lines are too short for desktop displays and too long for small phones (leading to awful linebreaks), which makes me the guy whose emails never look right. RFC 3676 [1] describes the format MIME parameter for text/plain content type documents which solves this issue. Unfortunately, it does not work well when sending inline patches via email since it introduces trailing whitespace. [1] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt

nfoz 7y ago

This looks fantastic. Thanks!!

diehunde 7y ago

Any idea how to fix this error?: panic: Attempted to draw outside of context goroutine 1 [running]: git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc/lib/ui.(*Context).Printf(0xc0002fa450, 0x2, 0x1, 0x0, 0x84de7f, 0x4, 0xc0000d3c98, 0x1, 0x1, 0x50) ... I just installed it on Fedora 30 and got that when trying to setup an account.

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
Try using a bigger terminal emulator. There's a ticket to deal with too-small terminals more elegantly but it hasn't been done yet.

vjr 7y ago

I miss pine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_%28email_client%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_%28email_client%29

msbarnett 7y ago
It’s still around: https://repo.or.cz/alpine.git https://repo.or.cz/alpine.git
- twic 7y ago
  I've been using it (Pine, the Alpine) as my primary mail client since 1998. Months after i started using it, someone suggested i try mutt. I'm definitely going to, but i haven't got round to it yet.
cyberjunkie 7y ago
Oh, I used this back in the mid-90s and it was SO good!
- Fnoord 7y ago
  If you liked Pine you will probably like Alpine and Pico's successor, Nano. What is the problem with Mutt though? Does Aerc have color or themeing support? Does it have a seperate daemon to talk the email protocols such as IMAP4?
  - cyberjunkie 7y ago
    I am a Nano user! Very happy. Vim users be hatin~
  - c-cube 7y ago
    mutt is single threaded, for a start.
rsync 7y ago
I use pine (alpine) as my primary (and only) mailtool - and have since 1993. Further, all rsync.net employees use pine for all rsync.net email. One interesting side-effect of this is that employee to employee emails are simply a local copy operation - they never traverse a network. If you're looking into a mailtool that can run in the terminal (like this, or like mutt or (al)pine) I encourage you to consider running that mailtool on the actual machine with your mailspool. It allows your email to show up in your INBOX immediately and, as described above, allows for email interactions that don't leave the server ...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

manjana 7y ago

Dont really see the need for a new email client, we already got Mutt, sup, alpine and a few others.

Tharkun 7y ago

Off-topic, but damn, Drew, how do you manage to be so productive? Sway alone is an impressive beast (and the only thing that got me off my awesomewm addiction). Now you're throwing in an impressive mutt alternative? Thanks for all the hard work!

suprfnk 7y ago
[–]drewdevault[S] 26 points 17 hours ago I work on free software full-time now thanks to the support of the many people who donate to my work :) https://drewdevault.com/2019/01/15/Im-doing-FOSS-full-time.html* https://drewdevault.com/2019/01/15/Im-doing-FOSS-full-time.h... Lots of people help with these projects, too. aerc 0.1.0 includes contributions from a total of 16 authors. From: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bwao4d/aerc_an_email_client_for_your_terminal/epwnx9p/?st=jwhohuww&sh=37d10be2 https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bwao4d/aerc_an_email...

chrismorgan 7y ago

In the video, it seems to be being pronounced “arc”. This is unfortunately confusable with a widely-deployed email authentication standard, ARC (http://arc-spec.org/ http://arc-spec.org/). I suggest contemplating at least a different pronunciation (even without changing the name, the spelling is open to about four pronunciations of varying obscurity and cumbersomeness—none of which particularly suggest the spelling “aerc” when heard, I may add).

Naac 7y ago

For those of you already using emacs, this mirrors my workflow in mu4e. Here are some screenshots[0], and here is a guide on how to set up mu4e[1]. [0] https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html [1] http://cachestocaches.com/2017/3/complete-guide-email-emacs-using-mu-and-/ http://cachestocaches.com/2017/3/complete-guide-email-emacs-...

ernst_klim 7y ago
My main concern with mu4e is that I have to fetch all the emails on my local machine. That's terrible, hope one day there will be a mu4e-like client for emacs with a thunderbird-like workflow, aka fetch in a lazy manner, before reading.
- meitham 7y ago
  I am the opposite of you, I prefer all my email to be avaialble offline to me. I use offlineimap to mirror my remote IMAP folders, and usually read them with mutt, but occasinaly read them in GUI emacs where the terminal does not support RTL, such as Arabic emails.
  - ernst_klim 7y ago
    >I am the opposite of you, I prefer all my email to be avaialble offline to me. Even spam or mails you want to delete before reading? There are dozens of mails I want to delete or put to the archive folder before reading, thus this feature is annoying me. And when I want to backup mail, I use offlineimap explicitly. Besides, I use mu4e of 3 separate machines, and on each I have to keep a local copy of all my mails, even mails I've read already.
    - meitham 7y ago
      I selectively choose which IMAP dirs to sync. ``Spam`` isn't one of them. I do however sync my ``Archive`` or ``ALLAMIL`` dir as I often need to quickly grep (notmuch) for messages wihout having network connectivity.

drejay 7y ago

Should you need the services of a good hacker, talk to darkcracker@protonmail.com. Dude is good.

bojanvidanovic 7y ago

That looks promising! I wish Mutt had a mail account configurator like the one in Aerc. Definitely giving it a try.

bronzecarnage 7y ago

Great work! I'm looking forward to using it full time. A couple of quick comments. 1. It doesn't seem to work with when $TERM is set to some non-default setting. (panic: terminal entry not found) 2. When term is forced to xterm-256-color, aerc crashes when the window is resized.

skrebbel 7y ago

Is Sir_Cmpwn a person or a committee? How can one person produce so much decent software?

hazbo 7y ago
I was thinking exactly this. It's unbelievable the amount of amazing things Drew has been putting out there recently.
eterps 7y ago
@Sir_Cmpwn do you have some insights to share on this? What are the conditions that make you most productive, and what conditions make you the least productive?
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  I get a lot of help. Fostering a healthy and happy community of contributors in each of my projects is extremely important to me. I'm also able to be more productive myself thanks to the support of hundreds of people who donate to my work or buy a sourcehut subscription, which allows me to work on free software full time.
  - theWheez 7y ago
    Any advice or insights on creating and fostering that community for your projects?
    - ddevault 7y ago
      https://drewdevault.com/2018/06/01/How-I-maintain-FOSS-projects.html https://drewdevault.com/2018/06/01/How-I-maintain-FOSS-proje...
      - theWheez 7y ago
        Perfect! Thank you :)

meehow 7y ago

What a beautiful code! It's not that common nowadays.

marttt 7y ago

Nice, looking forward to trying it out. Other similar projects worth mentioning: https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze - As the author says, "Unix utilities to deal with maildir". https://github.com/aligrudi/neatmail https://github.com/aligrudi/neatmail - A noninteractive client with ex-like commands http://plan9.stanleylieber.com/mother/ http://plan9.stanleylieber.com/mother/ - for Plan9 people.

necovek 7y ago

I find it funny that the first thing on their web site for a text-mode email client is a video screencast: as someone who likes spending time in text interfaces (terminal or emacs), it's exactly for the reasons videos are bad. You can't skip-through videos to get to the part you care about which is obvious in a textual format (and it's obvious if it's even there). You can't copy and paste stuff. You usually have to have sound on to understand what's going on. Sorry for ranting a bit about this modern tendency to record videos instead of write text :)

arnoooooo 7y ago

This is pretty awesome. I see only two things missing : - a way to have all accounts in the same tab, with a unified inbox - threading support, ideally with folding

lucb1e 7y ago
For what it's worth, I would want neither of those and would turn them off if they existed.

epse 7y ago

Is there any way to add a new folder from aerc? I'm loving it (besides a bug with reddit emails) but that's a major bummer (as well as no manual "refresh" option)

notinventedhear 7y ago

Very excited by the prospect of a modern terminal-mail client that is easier to use! After following the README: this is clearly not ready/designed for wide consumption - the recipe neglects to mention how to install a custom doc-tool called scdoc (by the same author?) that is required to build it - and there are no pre-built binaries (that I can see).

gbear605 7y ago
It’s still version 0.1
Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
Most Linux distros already have scdoc available: https://repology.org/project/scdoc/badges https://repology.org/project/scdoc/badges It's not designed to be installed from pre-built binaries. It requires some other stuff to be set up on your system, too. It's designed to be friendly for distros to package instead. If you want to install it from source, use the Makefile like everything else.

augustk 7y ago

What I miss is a low-resource email client with a GUI, something I (in principle) can run on a 20 year old computer.

3xblah 7y ago
https://www.nakka.com/soft/npop/index_eng.html https://www.nakka.com/soft/npop/index_eng.html
Yetanfou 7y ago
Try claws or sylpheed (from which claws is derived), these work just fine on older hardware. Startup time (with cold cache) on my 14yo T42p is under a second, RSS is 48MB with 4 active multi-gigabyte IMAP accounts. There is a bunch of extensions to add PGP integration etc. On Debian the package is called 'claws-mail', this name might be different elsewhere.
smhenderson 7y ago
Have you ever tried Claws[1]? I haven't used it for a while but when I did I was able to use it on quite older hardware running trimmed down versions of various Linux and BSD boxes. Besides being light weight it's got some good features for an older client, it's GPL and can use plug-ins for extra functionality. Nothing to do with he project, just a previously happy user. [1] https://www.claws-mail.org/ https://www.claws-mail.org/
hvsdjksj 7y ago
I'm still using the last version (12.16) of the original Opera browser for its integrated email client. It has everything you may need (POP3, IMAP, HTML editor, threaded view, labels, multiple accounts, etc., etc.), it works wonderfully on Linux, and on old, low memory machines too.

mukundmr 7y ago

Crashed on first email I read from Gmail. Also, I had to enable "less secure access" in Gmail for aerc to work. Will try again after a few months.

andrewchambers 7y ago
'Less secure' access is a choice by google to lock people onto gmail, they choose not to implement random device specific passwords. Better to avoid gmail.
- mjlee 7y ago
  How does it lock you in to gmail? They provide a method by which you can use any mail client if you'd like. Applications can always implement OAuth 2.0, which is pretty open (and is what you'll need to do for other mail providers, not just gmail.)
  - andrewchambers 7y ago
    They took something that worked fine, then broke it after they had the majority of users. There are backwards compatible and secure methods (Like allowing a unique password per device). It is an obvious tactic to force people to choose between gmail web client, and outlook/thunderbird/aerc. To make matters worse they falsely point the blame at competitors and then people like you defend them.
minusf 7y ago
"less secure" nonsense is required for mutt as well.

major505 7y ago

Thats neat. I aways wanted an text only email clientem easier to use than alpine and mutt. This on seens usable out of the box. I will take a look.

laktak 7y ago

https://github.com/ddevault/aerc https://github.com/ddevault/aerc > This repository is abandoned in favor of ongoing development on git.sr.ht. The codebase has been rewritten in Go and is much more stable and useful than what you see here. @Sir_Cmpwn what's the advantage of git.sr.ht over github?

matoro 7y ago
That's his own site that he built himself. It runs a ton of services, bug trackers, CI, mailing lists, wikis, etc. https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/
ddevault 7y ago
SourceHut is my own platform: https://sourcehut.org https://sourcehut.org It's entirely open source (unlike GitHub), has its own CI, and is mailing list oriented instead of PR oriented.
gbear605 7y ago
For one, he’s the lead dev on gir.sr.hr. In terms of general benefits: email workflow is a big one for those that like it, it’s open source, no javascript, no tracking, and built in continuous integration and mailing lists.

amiga_500 7y ago

How is this any improvement over mutt? I can use mutt with emacsclient as my editor, in tmux.

zurn 7y ago
Mutt IMAP is unusable on a laptop since it hangs and loses changes (eg read/unread status) when the IMAP connection flaps.
- amiga_500 7y ago
  I've used it for years and never had this.
Leace 7y ago
Some parts of mutt look like unmaintained and on life-support. I've seen the GPG interface code and it's full of deprecated code (e.g. PKA support) or subtle bugs.

pge 7y ago

I used mutt+offlineimap for a few years, with a corporate account on an MSExchange Server and the two biggest issues I had (which I hope Aerc addresses) were: * no good way to search/auto-complete addresses (I used vdirsyncer which got me the address book locally but there was no easy way to fill-in addresses when typing an email). * no way to accept calendar requests - I would pull them up on my phone to accept or reject. Otherwise, everything worked quite well, but those issues annoying enough that I eventually switched back to a Windows machine with Outlook. The Email+Calendar+Addressbook integration may violate the Linux philosophy of doing one thing well, but for today's typical office workflow it is frustrating not to have a platform with all three integrated.

btreecat 7y ago
You might be interested in dav mail. http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ I have it setup so I can use thunderbird for all my exchange interaction (except group management).
- pge 7y ago
  Thanks - I was actually using Davmail but at the time it did not have the address book and calendar integration, and I had not checked up on it ina few years. Looks like it has gotten more features since then. I may have to give mutt another try...:)

sandreas 7y ago

Good job. Markdown support for sending html-Mails would be very nice ;)

nwmcsween 7y ago

Hmm why not mblaze[0] over aerc? [0] https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze

yayitsreallyme 7y ago

This is great! More email clients are always welcomed. :)

alpaca128 7y ago

I just tried it and I love it! Mutt could never convince me because the configuration seemed overly complicated and I didn't like the controls. Now maybe I'm just blind but I can't see a way to highlight unread emails in any way. Once I can get this working I'll switch in a heartbeat.