11 ms·

Mutt 2.0 Release Notes

281 points by jimiray 6y ago

JoshTriplett 6y ago
> Automatic reconnect to IMAP on error Really looking forward to this. This was the one notable issue I had with mutt: if you lose your connection, it would forget which mails you marked as read, deleted, etc.
- RMPR 6y ago
  That's what drove me initially to aerc + notmuch
  - tjoff 6y ago
    That works? One of the main reasons I'm considering switching from aerc to mutt/something else is because IMAP keeps disconnecting. Seems like the number 3 item you would want to nail down in a mail-client. But I'm sure it is just me that haven't looked into it yet. Unfortunately I just can't find time for it for the time being.
    - DJHenk 6y ago
      I think it is much lower on the list for terminal-first users than that, as they use Aerc or Mutt solely for reading and writing mail on the local machine and rely on other programs to sync the incoming and outgoing mail with the external mail server. I use Aerc, but also msmtp for sending and mbsync for receiving mail, for instance. This aligns more with the Unix philosophy of combining multiple small programs that do only one thing well into a personalized workflow.
      - RMPR 6y ago
        This, and with notmuch it's awesome (the search is close to if not better than Gmail's one). I find myself less relying on the web interface of Gmail, except for HTML emails sigh. I know I can just install socksify, but it isn't packaged in my distro, and I already manage too much programs installed from source. I might write a blog post about this setup one day.
      - tjoff 6y ago
        I don't buy that. Either it is important or you don't have the feature at all. The Unix philosophy isn't to do everything and some things poorly and let the users figure out which parts are good and which are bad that needs a separate application to do it properly.
      - JoshTriplett 6y ago
        I don't want to debug multiple programs when mail isn't getting sent or received. I don't want to have programs that think they've sent mail when they've just handed off responsibility to some other program. And, closely related, I don't want to have incidents where mail isn't getting sent and I don't know that. I'd like a mail client as capable as mutt, but that also works whether I'm online or not, handles mail sync automatically in the background while I start processing those mails, lets me browse and search and draft responses offline, and has a built-in idea of "has that mail been sent yet?" rather than just saying "sent" the moment a mail goes into another queue the client doesn't manage without giving any status for when it actually gets sent. And all that while also leaving mail on the server so that other mail clients such as K-9 mail on my phone (which can do all those things) can also process mail. Sometimes I like "programs that do one thing well". But doing mail well involves taking full responsibility for mail.
        RMPR 6y ago
        >I'd like a mail client as capable as mutt, but that also works whether I'm online or not, handles mail sync automatically in the background while I start processing those mails, lets me browse and search and draft responses offline, and has a built-in idea of "has that mail been sent yet?" rather than just saying "sent" the moment a mail goes into another queue the client doesn't manage without giving any status for when it actually gets sent. And all that while also leaving mail on the server so that other mail clients such as K-9 mail on my phone (which can do all those things) can also process mail.. FWIW aerc does have all this built-in, but also offers the possibility to just hand off responsibility to external programs. As far as I'm concerned, I use the built-in email sender. Unfortunately, the built-in emails fetcher does not work well with poor internet connection or offline. That's why I use offlineimap to sync maildirs every 5 mins, and notmuch is just the icing on the cake for fast search/indexing.
- Fnoord 6y ago
  Its been a while since I used Mutt extensively (lets say about 15 years) but IIRC you could use $ to sync the changes, though you'd have to do it manually.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    You can, but you have to do that manually while you still have your connection. I've gotten into the habit of doing that frequently while triaging mail, but I'd rather not have to.
azamba 6y ago
Does anyone use Mutt with gmail or alikes today? Is it worth it? Mutt was my preferred email client back in 2000-2004. But gave it up for Gmail web interface.
- davidbanham 6y ago
  Mutt and Gmail work fine together. I always find myself opening up the web UI when I need to search, though. I’ve taken a a few steps down the notmuch path a few times but it feels like such a big Thing to have to set up a whole local mail system just for search.
- Zhyl 6y ago
  Yes, set up with Luke Smith's excellent mutt Wizard [0]. Contrary to the other point, having a local copy of my emails gives me a sense of security and I can set up scripts using normal scripting tools to move stuff around. `notmuch` is good, but actually I can meet most of my searching needs with a 'limit' filter. [0] https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard
  - OxO4 6y ago
    FWIW, Luke Smith has some problematic political views (as in far right/alt-right). You do you but I personally avoid sharing/using any of his content for that reason.
    - Zhyl 6y ago
      Yeah, he also did some excellent YouTube videos and tutorials which helped me get into i3 and mutt, but I find it hard to recommend them now because they're mixed in on his channel with some weird ranty videos that, at best, don't have much to do with tech. I still recommend mutt Wizard though because it makes it so much easier to get everything set up. I feel like it should be absorbed into neomutt or similar because it feels like such a basic thing to get right.
- freedomben 6y ago
  I'm considering it now that my nostalgia is flaring up. One thing that was a pain point in the past was offline use. If your mail provider is IMAP only then you need to hack stuff together to use offline. As a paranoid freak I prefer to have offline copies of everything.
freedomben 6y ago
So mutt is still receiving releases? That's neat. I may have to revisit and see what's new in 2.0. I went through a CLI-only phase where I didn't use a desktop environment. My "DE" was just tmux in a pseudo-terminal. The main reason I went back to a graphical workstation was a need for G Suite and Slack's horrible support for Weechat. Mutt was a critical member of the toolkit and I have fond memories of hyper productivity. Search was crap though. If you're thinking about doing this, I recommend trying to live in a VM running Fedora Server or Arch or Ubuntu Server or something. If you find yourself unable to use a CLI browser for some reason, at least you don't have to tell work "sorry I gotta install my OS before I can look at <thing>" (that doesn't go over well).
- k2enemy 6y ago
  I you revisit, be sure to check out notmuch as the search backend. It is super fast and has a nice and powerful search syntax. [1] https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-mutt/ https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-mutt/
  - em-bee 6y ago
    how is the folder handling with notmuch in mutt? i use sup (which is where notmuch came from) because it provides on-the-fly virtual folders where emails match a search query or a tag. i can also open multiple folders at once and switch between them without loosing state. it's been a while, but when i last used mutt it could not do that
    - k2enemy 6y ago
      Mutt cannot do multiple folders and keep state. Coincidentally, I used to use sup and it is my favorite mail client that I've used. At the time there was no way to sync changes back to maildir or some format that IMAP could sync. Is that still the case?
      - rakoo 6y ago
        No, maildir syncback has been merged for some time already (https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/wiki/Using-sup-with-other-clients https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/wiki/Using-sup-with-ot...): changes in sup are sent back to maildir, which is synchronized back to IMAP as usual !
edward 6y ago
See also: https://neomutt.org/ https://neomutt.org/
- mseidl 6y ago
  I switched to neomutt a while ago.
  - neolog 6y ago
    How is it?
    - gray_-_wolf 6y ago
      Fine. With mutt I would need bunch of patches anyway, here they come from the upstream. They do have a bit of regressions from time to time, but they are fairly quick to respond with workarounds and fix it.
icedchai 6y ago
I use mutt for my self-hosted email server. Glad to see it's still being developed!
trasz 6y ago
Automatic reconnection is the last feature I've been missing. At this point, from my point of view, mutt is complete.
- em-bee 6y ago
  i see your point
flas9sd 6y ago
this one is very welcome: > If you sometimes forget a pattern modifier, you can type Tab after the ~ to get a list of pattern modifiers. these are useful to quickly filter for a string in the From: or any other header field
gpanders 6y ago
The conditional option setting with MuttLisp will be very useful
- stevekemp 6y ago
  I was often frustrated there wasn't a complete scripting language integrated with Mutt, so people had to make hacks to do things in a fully scriptable fashion. I put together a console based client, inspired by mutt, but fully developed and configured with Lua to resolve that problem - https://lumail.org/ https://lumail.org/ I had a good few years working on it, and really liked the way it was "modal". Sadly I never quite got enough users to be worth continuing with. These days I pay for gsuite instead, and use offline IMAP only to keep a backup of the remote mails. It was an interesting thing to work on, and I've been following the new aerc client to see what happens there. I'm sure there is still room for new console based mail-clients, perhaps mine was just a bit too unfamiliar!
  - gpanders 6y ago
    That’s a real shame that lumail didn’t take off (I had never heard of it until now). I agree, embedding something like Lua or even Guile into Mutt seems like it would be very useful
linsomniac 6y ago
This is awesome! Mutt holds a very special place in my heart, even though I haven't used it in like a decade. I did use it for a very long time, and it was fantastic! Well into the 2000s I had UUCP delivering email to postfix on my laptop, read and sent using mutt. UUCP was extremely capable for handling e-mail on a laptop, whether disconnected because I was traveling and on a CDMA connection, on a spotty wireless, or at the coffee shop. I have kind of given up on e-mail... I don't even check it daily for work, and a few times a week personally. I use gmail because they do a really good job of spam filtering and I don't have to deal with infrastructure.
dilawar 6y ago
These days I don't use mutt much because I need to mark some emails as 'remind me later' and bluemail and gmail offers this functionality. Is there a mutt alternative?
- Sesse__ 6y ago
  Use shift-F to mark the email as “flag”. It's exactly the same functionality as Gmail's starring, and maps to it over IMAP.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    That's not the same function as "remind me later", which actually does remind you at a future time. I use shift-F in Mutt to flag emails. I then lose track of them, because I have too many flagged emails! Task-based tagging might be better (using Notmuch) but I haven't found a good workflow for this yet.
charliebrownau 6y ago
Can Mutt finally work with Tutanota + Protonmail in 2020-2021 ?
dm319 6y ago
Just in case anyone is curious as to why someone would use mutt, here are a few: 1. I can edit and compose emails in my favourite editor 2. Near instantaneous launch 3. Can launch multiple instances, allowing for viewing/searching to happen concurrently 4. Rapid search with advanced searching features - i.e. find all emails that have 1 or more attachments sent to me from within a month of 1/1/2019 from someone with a "csu" email - would be l ~f csu ~X > 0 ~d 1/1/2019*1m 5. Deal rapidly with emails - I have 'd' for delete and move to next and 'y' for archive and move to next, I can zip through emails quicker than on any other email client I have used 6. I can work effectively when I'm offline or have patchy internet/signal (i.e. on a train) using mbsync or similar to store emails locally and sync up with my gmail account when I have internet. 7. Highly configurable - custom set-up for what data I want to see in my inbox, and what colours to use and what to highlight 8. Intelligent reply-all - it knows I have several email aliases that belong to me so I don't reply to myself
- singingfish 6y ago
  Mutt's still really useful. Need to deal with plain text messages or whole message bodies to send around to different places on the internet? Then mutt's what you need. Huge mail boxes that choke outlook? Mutt. I don't use it often these days but a mutt setup is super-handy.
- Scarbutt 6y ago
  How do you send html emails? write the tags manually and sending it as text/html ?
  - dm319 6y ago
    I found this [1], but I think something along those lines would work. [1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/36881/sending-html-with-mutt-or-another-terminal-mail-client https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/36881/sending-html-...
  - WhyNotHugo 6y ago
    Generally Mutt users don't. Personally I find the need for HTML email extremely unusual (maybe once every year or two?). My guess is that, for the average Mutt user, it's less than that.
labawi 6y ago
I like mutt and use it for some accounts, though there are ergonomic issues that bug me. For instance, there is no consistent way to cancel actions / exit prompts (or none that I noticed), while pressing <Esc> does nothing. I know terminals have issues with <Esc> but even double <Esc> just gives you ^[^[.
- leephillips 6y ago
  It’s control-G. Effective use of Mutt requires at least skimming the manual.
mel12345 6y ago
Slightly tangential; I would love to use Mutt but the work email is on Exchange, which requires 2FA, and I haven't been able to figure out how to download the emails.

281 points by jimiray 6y ago

> Automatic reconnect to IMAP on error Really looking forward to this. This was the one notable issue I had with mutt: if you lose your connection, it would forget which mails you marked as read, deleted, etc.

RMPR 6y ago
That's what drove me initially to aerc + notmuch
- tjoff 6y ago
  That works? One of the main reasons I'm considering switching from aerc to mutt/something else is because IMAP keeps disconnecting. Seems like the number 3 item you would want to nail down in a mail-client. But I'm sure it is just me that haven't looked into it yet. Unfortunately I just can't find time for it for the time being.
  - DJHenk 6y ago
    I think it is much lower on the list for terminal-first users than that, as they use Aerc or Mutt solely for reading and writing mail on the local machine and rely on other programs to sync the incoming and outgoing mail with the external mail server. I use Aerc, but also msmtp for sending and mbsync for receiving mail, for instance. This aligns more with the Unix philosophy of combining multiple small programs that do only one thing well into a personalized workflow.
    - RMPR 6y ago
      This, and with notmuch it's awesome (the search is close to if not better than Gmail's one). I find myself less relying on the web interface of Gmail, except for HTML emails sigh. I know I can just install socksify, but it isn't packaged in my distro, and I already manage too much programs installed from source. I might write a blog post about this setup one day.
    - tjoff 6y ago
      I don't buy that. Either it is important or you don't have the feature at all. The Unix philosophy isn't to do everything and some things poorly and let the users figure out which parts are good and which are bad that needs a separate application to do it properly.
    - JoshTriplett 6y ago
      I don't want to debug multiple programs when mail isn't getting sent or received. I don't want to have programs that think they've sent mail when they've just handed off responsibility to some other program. And, closely related, I don't want to have incidents where mail isn't getting sent and I don't know that. I'd like a mail client as capable as mutt, but that also works whether I'm online or not, handles mail sync automatically in the background while I start processing those mails, lets me browse and search and draft responses offline, and has a built-in idea of "has that mail been sent yet?" rather than just saying "sent" the moment a mail goes into another queue the client doesn't manage without giving any status for when it actually gets sent. And all that while also leaving mail on the server so that other mail clients such as K-9 mail on my phone (which can do all those things) can also process mail. Sometimes I like "programs that do one thing well". But doing mail well involves taking full responsibility for mail.
      - RMPR 6y ago
        >I'd like a mail client as capable as mutt, but that also works whether I'm online or not, handles mail sync automatically in the background while I start processing those mails, lets me browse and search and draft responses offline, and has a built-in idea of "has that mail been sent yet?" rather than just saying "sent" the moment a mail goes into another queue the client doesn't manage without giving any status for when it actually gets sent. And all that while also leaving mail on the server so that other mail clients such as K-9 mail on my phone (which can do all those things) can also process mail.. FWIW aerc does have all this built-in, but also offers the possibility to just hand off responsibility to external programs. As far as I'm concerned, I use the built-in email sender. Unfortunately, the built-in emails fetcher does not work well with poor internet connection or offline. That's why I use offlineimap to sync maildirs every 5 mins, and notmuch is just the icing on the cake for fast search/indexing.
Fnoord 6y ago
Its been a while since I used Mutt extensively (lets say about 15 years) but IIRC you could use $ to sync the changes, though you'd have to do it manually.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  You can, but you have to do that manually while you still have your connection. I've gotten into the habit of doing that frequently while triaging mail, but I'd rather not have to.

azamba 6y ago

Does anyone use Mutt with gmail or alikes today? Is it worth it? Mutt was my preferred email client back in 2000-2004. But gave it up for Gmail web interface.

davidbanham 6y ago
Mutt and Gmail work fine together. I always find myself opening up the web UI when I need to search, though. I’ve taken a a few steps down the notmuch path a few times but it feels like such a big Thing to have to set up a whole local mail system just for search.
Zhyl 6y ago
Yes, set up with Luke Smith's excellent mutt Wizard [0]. Contrary to the other point, having a local copy of my emails gives me a sense of security and I can set up scripts using normal scripting tools to move stuff around. `notmuch` is good, but actually I can meet most of my searching needs with a 'limit' filter. [0] https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard
- OxO4 6y ago
  FWIW, Luke Smith has some problematic political views (as in far right/alt-right). You do you but I personally avoid sharing/using any of his content for that reason.
  - Zhyl 6y ago
    Yeah, he also did some excellent YouTube videos and tutorials which helped me get into i3 and mutt, but I find it hard to recommend them now because they're mixed in on his channel with some weird ranty videos that, at best, don't have much to do with tech. I still recommend mutt Wizard though because it makes it so much easier to get everything set up. I feel like it should be absorbed into neomutt or similar because it feels like such a basic thing to get right.
freedomben 6y ago
I'm considering it now that my nostalgia is flaring up. One thing that was a pain point in the past was offline use. If your mail provider is IMAP only then you need to hack stuff together to use offline. As a paranoid freak I prefer to have offline copies of everything.

freedomben 6y ago

So mutt is still receiving releases? That's neat. I may have to revisit and see what's new in 2.0. I went through a CLI-only phase where I didn't use a desktop environment. My "DE" was just tmux in a pseudo-terminal. The main reason I went back to a graphical workstation was a need for G Suite and Slack's horrible support for Weechat. Mutt was a critical member of the toolkit and I have fond memories of hyper productivity. Search was crap though. If you're thinking about doing this, I recommend trying to live in a VM running Fedora Server or Arch or Ubuntu Server or something. If you find yourself unable to use a CLI browser for some reason, at least you don't have to tell work "sorry I gotta install my OS before I can look at <thing>" (that doesn't go over well).

k2enemy 6y ago
I you revisit, be sure to check out notmuch as the search backend. It is super fast and has a nice and powerful search syntax. [1] https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-mutt/ https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-mutt/
- em-bee 6y ago
  how is the folder handling with notmuch in mutt? i use sup (which is where notmuch came from) because it provides on-the-fly virtual folders where emails match a search query or a tag. i can also open multiple folders at once and switch between them without loosing state. it's been a while, but when i last used mutt it could not do that
  - k2enemy 6y ago
    Mutt cannot do multiple folders and keep state. Coincidentally, I used to use sup and it is my favorite mail client that I've used. At the time there was no way to sync changes back to maildir or some format that IMAP could sync. Is that still the case?
    - rakoo 6y ago
      No, maildir syncback has been merged for some time already (https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/wiki/Using-sup-with-other-clients https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/wiki/Using-sup-with-ot...): changes in sup are sent back to maildir, which is synchronized back to IMAP as usual !

edward 6y ago

See also: https://neomutt.org/ https://neomutt.org/

mseidl 6y ago
I switched to neomutt a while ago.
- neolog 6y ago
  How is it?
  - gray_-_wolf 6y ago
    Fine. With mutt I would need bunch of patches anyway, here they come from the upstream. They do have a bit of regressions from time to time, but they are fairly quick to respond with workarounds and fix it.

icedchai 6y ago

I use mutt for my self-hosted email server. Glad to see it's still being developed!

trasz 6y ago

Automatic reconnection is the last feature I've been missing. At this point, from my point of view, mutt is complete.

em-bee 6y ago
i see your point

flas9sd 6y ago

this one is very welcome: > If you sometimes forget a pattern modifier, you can type Tab after the ~ to get a list of pattern modifiers. these are useful to quickly filter for a string in the From: or any other header field

gpanders 6y ago

The conditional option setting with MuttLisp will be very useful

stevekemp 6y ago
I was often frustrated there wasn't a complete scripting language integrated with Mutt, so people had to make hacks to do things in a fully scriptable fashion. I put together a console based client, inspired by mutt, but fully developed and configured with Lua to resolve that problem - https://lumail.org/ https://lumail.org/ I had a good few years working on it, and really liked the way it was "modal". Sadly I never quite got enough users to be worth continuing with. These days I pay for gsuite instead, and use offline IMAP only to keep a backup of the remote mails. It was an interesting thing to work on, and I've been following the new aerc client to see what happens there. I'm sure there is still room for new console based mail-clients, perhaps mine was just a bit too unfamiliar!
- gpanders 6y ago
  That’s a real shame that lumail didn’t take off (I had never heard of it until now). I agree, embedding something like Lua or even Guile into Mutt seems like it would be very useful

linsomniac 6y ago

This is awesome! Mutt holds a very special place in my heart, even though I haven't used it in like a decade. I did use it for a very long time, and it was fantastic! Well into the 2000s I had UUCP delivering email to postfix on my laptop, read and sent using mutt. UUCP was extremely capable for handling e-mail on a laptop, whether disconnected because I was traveling and on a CDMA connection, on a spotty wireless, or at the coffee shop. I have kind of given up on e-mail... I don't even check it daily for work, and a few times a week personally. I use gmail because they do a really good job of spam filtering and I don't have to deal with infrastructure.

dilawar 6y ago

These days I don't use mutt much because I need to mark some emails as 'remind me later' and bluemail and gmail offers this functionality. Is there a mutt alternative?

Sesse__ 6y ago
Use shift-F to mark the email as “flag”. It's exactly the same functionality as Gmail's starring, and maps to it over IMAP.
- jlokier 6y ago
  That's not the same function as "remind me later", which actually does remind you at a future time. I use shift-F in Mutt to flag emails. I then lose track of them, because I have too many flagged emails! Task-based tagging might be better (using Notmuch) but I haven't found a good workflow for this yet.

charliebrownau 6y ago

Can Mutt finally work with Tutanota + Protonmail in 2020-2021 ?

dm319 6y ago

Just in case anyone is curious as to why someone would use mutt, here are a few: 1. I can edit and compose emails in my favourite editor 2. Near instantaneous launch 3. Can launch multiple instances, allowing for viewing/searching to happen concurrently 4. Rapid search with advanced searching features - i.e. find all emails that have 1 or more attachments sent to me from within a month of 1/1/2019 from someone with a "csu" email - would be l ~f csu ~X > 0 ~d 1/1/2019*1m 5. Deal rapidly with emails - I have 'd' for delete and move to next and 'y' for archive and move to next, I can zip through emails quicker than on any other email client I have used 6. I can work effectively when I'm offline or have patchy internet/signal (i.e. on a train) using mbsync or similar to store emails locally and sync up with my gmail account when I have internet. 7. Highly configurable - custom set-up for what data I want to see in my inbox, and what colours to use and what to highlight 8. Intelligent reply-all - it knows I have several email aliases that belong to me so I don't reply to myself

singingfish 6y ago
Mutt's still really useful. Need to deal with plain text messages or whole message bodies to send around to different places on the internet? Then mutt's what you need. Huge mail boxes that choke outlook? Mutt. I don't use it often these days but a mutt setup is super-handy.
Scarbutt 6y ago
How do you send html emails? write the tags manually and sending it as text/html ?
- dm319 6y ago
  I found this [1], but I think something along those lines would work. [1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/36881/sending-html-with-mutt-or-another-terminal-mail-client https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/36881/sending-html-...
- WhyNotHugo 6y ago
  Generally Mutt users don't. Personally I find the need for HTML email extremely unusual (maybe once every year or two?). My guess is that, for the average Mutt user, it's less than that.

labawi 6y ago

I like mutt and use it for some accounts, though there are ergonomic issues that bug me. For instance, there is no consistent way to cancel actions / exit prompts (or none that I noticed), while pressing <Esc> does nothing. I know terminals have issues with <Esc> but even double <Esc> just gives you ^[^[.

leephillips 6y ago
It’s control-G. Effective use of Mutt requires at least skimming the manual.

mel12345 6y ago

Slightly tangential; I would love to use Mutt but the work email is on Exchange, which requires 2FA, and I haven't been able to figure out how to download the emails.