6 ms·

Mutt releases version 2.0

139 points by leephillips 6y ago

dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
If you don't need to work with images or formatted content, Mutt is far superior than Gmail and other webmail solutions. There is no perceptible delay, everything is happening instantly. I feel like I can answer dozens of emails in an hour and keep an empty inbox just because the experience is so smooth.
- enriquto 6y ago
  OK for the limitations about "formatted content" (these limitations are a feature to many people). But images and other file attachments are much easier to deal with in mutt than in gmail. They are just seamlessly opened by whatever image viewer you have chosen.
  - leephillips 6y ago
    And you can put a shell pipeline in your mailcap file, so you can pre- or post-process your attachments as well as simply viewing them.
  - pge 6y ago
    The two things that I had trouble with last time I used Mutt were calendar invitations from outlook or google calendar, and html pages (without opening firefox). Any suggestions on best practices?
    - leephillips 6y ago
      For HTML, set auto_view text/html in your startup file, and Mutt will consult your mailcap file to see what viewer you prefer. It will use that (lynx, w3m, etc) to display the HTML email in the pager as a default. For calendar invitations: I've never tried to integrate that, but if they are attachments with a mime type, you can put instructions for processing them in the mailcap as well.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - johnisgood 6y ago
        I have it set for text/x-patch text/x-darcs-patch along with a macro pager. Could do git, too, if you receive pull requests or patches often via e-mail.
- ssivark 6y ago
  Is there anything that has a clean and responsive viewer that supports HTML/formatted email with images, with an efficient keyboard-driven interface like mutt/notmuch/etc? Ideally, I would like my mail storage to be separated from indexing to be separated from access interface. I don't know why the graphical programs don't modularize the problem space that way.
  - t0astbread 6y ago
    Have you looked at astroid before? https://astroidmail.github.io/ https://astroidmail.github.io/
    - ssivark 6y ago
      Wow, astroid seems quite close to what I had in mind. I'll definitely give it a try -- thanks! Seems also like it is not actively maintained currently, but I'm hoping it's probably feature-complete and stable enough to be in mostly maintenance mode. For anyone else who might be interested: https://github.com/astroidmail/astroid/issues/669 https://github.com/astroidmail/astroid/issues/669
  - u801e 6y ago
    I'm not sure whether Thunderbird would meet your criteria, but there are a number of keyboard bindings and it can handle HTML messages reasonably well (especially if you set the view option to plain text).
- b20000 6y ago
  I've been wanting to transition off fastmail and google apps mail for a while to mutt but sometimes I get email with attachments and images and I still don't understand what the best practice is to deal with those. I'm on debian buster. I also need to migrate like 50 gigs worth of email. Some of that is in those 2 services and some of that in mail folders on Mac OSX.
- herewulf 6y ago
  Agreed. I used mutt for all my email for a good six years or so until about 2012. However, all the HTML mail with no plaintext version that I was getting killed it for me. There's .mailcap and dumping the HTML through w3m trickery that I know about now that probably bears revisiting mutt.
dm319 6y ago
The article has explained to me nicely why I seem to get disorientated switching from my native mutt to Gmail webmail. I'd also noticed this threading issue in outlook when two emails without subject lines were threaded together.
logix 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25019901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25019901
- dang 6y ago
  More Mutt from 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173676
steelframe 6y ago
I personally find the concepts that the Mutt UI implements to be amazingly efficient for any task that requires human review of individual items in a set. For example, I am a moderator for a popular subreddit. I've written a Python app that uses the requests module to interact with the Reddit API and displays the items on the mod queue via curses, Mutt-style. I use columns to give me succinct metrics on each element, such as the number of times the author of a submission posted the same URL across other subreddits (that's a strong indication of spamming). I move around the list with vim-like key bindings (i.e. k/j for up/down), and when I want to approve a post or comment, I just hit 'a'. If I want to remove a post or comment and ban the author, I just hit 'b'. If I want to dig in to the post or comment to get more data about it, such as view its full contents along with all the reports on the item, I just hit space or enter. From there I can hit one of the usual keys to approve, remove, etc. Since I'm a huge fan of instant UI feedback, I immediately remove the item from the list once I've hit a keystroke to take action on it. I asynchronously schedule the Reddit API call on a queue that implements the action, making sure to .join the queue on the app quit path so if I'm feeling especially twitchy about blasting through the mod queue and leaving before all the API calls can complete, I don't leave them dangling. Any time I have any tasks at work that require manually making quick-fire decisions about largely homogeneous tasks, I routinely evaluate how hard it is to hack up a similar Python+requests+curses app to mimic Mutt. It's addictive. It's also mildly infuriating when someone builds a tool and forces you to use their "super special value-add web UI" without providing a stable and documented RESTful API. Even if I can funnel only 90% of the stuff through my Mutt-like app and need to resort to the web UI for 10% of more special-case items, I still count that as a big win for my personal productivity (and sanity).
- leephillips 6y ago
  Interesting! I wonder how far one could get using Mutt itself, rather than coding a special-purpose curses program for each situation. In other words, convert whatever data you have into an mbox format, and use Mutt macros to take actions. Just thinking out loud here.
  - herewulf 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
qwerty456127 6y ago
> One of Mutt's unusual strengths is that it actually displays message threads correctly. When people complain that they have trouble following email conversations involving groups of people, what they typically mean is that they are using a client such as Gmail that does not properly display the reply structure of email messages. When an email user hits the reply key, an In-Reply-To header should be added to the email. Mutt refers to these headers, and to the related References header, to keep track of which messages replied to what, and builds a tree to show the structure of the conversation. Some other mail clients attempt to construct this tree using only the Subject header This seems somehow wild to me. Why don't other email apps use the appropriate header fields? Why do they even try to use the subject field? Why do they insist on quoting the whole thread text below the message body? Why not do all this the proper way?
- jiveturkey 6y ago
  the only problem with this is that gmail does show the proper, header-referenced, thread structure. as well as subject “referenced”. anyway one shouldn’t blame gmail. it’s outlook that forced gmail’s hand. furthermore, like a bike vs car accident, you can be correct and still dead. mutts insistence of “keeping the thread” when users change the subject is “correct” yet still dead. 99% of users — aka normies — reply to an existing message when starting a new thread. changing the subject in almost all cases is intended to create a new thread, not a new subthread. one has to work with the users you have, not the users you wish you had.
  - JNRowe 6y ago
    FWIW, in mutt tapping # on a message that should have been a new thread will make it such. And you can rejoin messages where people sent a new mail instead of a reply with &. Things like this, along with tools like t-prot¹, allow you to live the mail you want while still interacting with others ;) ¹ http://www.escape.de/~tolot/mutt/ http://www.escape.de/~tolot/mutt/
    - jiveturkey 6y ago
      i'm not criticizing mutt at all here. in fact i am going to try it out for awhile. i never used mutt back in the day, as i was always a gnus user. what i find fault with in the lwn article is the "attack" on gmail. gmail has its reasons for doing the things it does, good reasons. i actually liked mulberry quite a lot. especially the feature where 'reply' brings up an interstitial allowing you to select to/cc/bcc for each recipient. another aspect of email completely lost on normies. but it's day has passed.
bjarneh 6y ago
The amount of time I've spent on my old .muttrc file is almost embarrassing...

139 points by leephillips 6y ago

If you don't need to work with images or formatted content, Mutt is far superior than Gmail and other webmail solutions. There is no perceptible delay, everything is happening instantly. I feel like I can answer dozens of emails in an hour and keep an empty inbox just because the experience is so smooth.

enriquto 6y ago
OK for the limitations about "formatted content" (these limitations are a feature to many people). But images and other file attachments are much easier to deal with in mutt than in gmail. They are just seamlessly opened by whatever image viewer you have chosen.
- leephillips 6y ago
  And you can put a shell pipeline in your mailcap file, so you can pre- or post-process your attachments as well as simply viewing them.
- pge 6y ago
  The two things that I had trouble with last time I used Mutt were calendar invitations from outlook or google calendar, and html pages (without opening firefox). Any suggestions on best practices?
  - leephillips 6y ago
    For HTML, set auto_view text/html in your startup file, and Mutt will consult your mailcap file to see what viewer you prefer. It will use that (lynx, w3m, etc) to display the HTML email in the pager as a default. For calendar invitations: I've never tried to integrate that, but if they are attachments with a mime type, you can put instructions for processing them in the mailcap as well.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - johnisgood 6y ago
      I have it set for text/x-patch text/x-darcs-patch along with a macro pager. Could do git, too, if you receive pull requests or patches often via e-mail.
ssivark 6y ago
Is there anything that has a clean and responsive viewer that supports HTML/formatted email with images, with an efficient keyboard-driven interface like mutt/notmuch/etc? Ideally, I would like my mail storage to be separated from indexing to be separated from access interface. I don't know why the graphical programs don't modularize the problem space that way.
- t0astbread 6y ago
  Have you looked at astroid before? https://astroidmail.github.io/ https://astroidmail.github.io/
  - ssivark 6y ago
    Wow, astroid seems quite close to what I had in mind. I'll definitely give it a try -- thanks! Seems also like it is not actively maintained currently, but I'm hoping it's probably feature-complete and stable enough to be in mostly maintenance mode. For anyone else who might be interested: https://github.com/astroidmail/astroid/issues/669 https://github.com/astroidmail/astroid/issues/669
- u801e 6y ago
  I'm not sure whether Thunderbird would meet your criteria, but there are a number of keyboard bindings and it can handle HTML messages reasonably well (especially if you set the view option to plain text).
b20000 6y ago
I've been wanting to transition off fastmail and google apps mail for a while to mutt but sometimes I get email with attachments and images and I still don't understand what the best practice is to deal with those. I'm on debian buster. I also need to migrate like 50 gigs worth of email. Some of that is in those 2 services and some of that in mail folders on Mac OSX.
herewulf 6y ago
Agreed. I used mutt for all my email for a good six years or so until about 2012. However, all the HTML mail with no plaintext version that I was getting killed it for me. There's .mailcap and dumping the HTML through w3m trickery that I know about now that probably bears revisiting mutt.

dm319 6y ago

The article has explained to me nicely why I seem to get disorientated switching from my native mutt to Gmail webmail. I'd also noticed this threading issue in outlook when two emails without subject lines were threaded together.

logix 6y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25019901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25019901

dang 6y ago
More Mutt from 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173676

steelframe 6y ago

I personally find the concepts that the Mutt UI implements to be amazingly efficient for any task that requires human review of individual items in a set. For example, I am a moderator for a popular subreddit. I've written a Python app that uses the requests module to interact with the Reddit API and displays the items on the mod queue via curses, Mutt-style. I use columns to give me succinct metrics on each element, such as the number of times the author of a submission posted the same URL across other subreddits (that's a strong indication of spamming). I move around the list with vim-like key bindings (i.e. k/j for up/down), and when I want to approve a post or comment, I just hit 'a'. If I want to remove a post or comment and ban the author, I just hit 'b'. If I want to dig in to the post or comment to get more data about it, such as view its full contents along with all the reports on the item, I just hit space or enter. From there I can hit one of the usual keys to approve, remove, etc. Since I'm a huge fan of instant UI feedback, I immediately remove the item from the list once I've hit a keystroke to take action on it. I asynchronously schedule the Reddit API call on a queue that implements the action, making sure to .join the queue on the app quit path so if I'm feeling especially twitchy about blasting through the mod queue and leaving before all the API calls can complete, I don't leave them dangling. Any time I have any tasks at work that require manually making quick-fire decisions about largely homogeneous tasks, I routinely evaluate how hard it is to hack up a similar Python+requests+curses app to mimic Mutt. It's addictive. It's also mildly infuriating when someone builds a tool and forces you to use their "super special value-add web UI" without providing a stable and documented RESTful API. Even if I can funnel only 90% of the stuff through my Mutt-like app and need to resort to the web UI for 10% of more special-case items, I still count that as a big win for my personal productivity (and sanity).

leephillips 6y ago
Interesting! I wonder how far one could get using Mutt itself, rather than coding a special-purpose curses program for each situation. In other words, convert whatever data you have into an mbox format, and use Mutt macros to take actions. Just thinking out loud here.
- herewulf 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

qwerty456127 6y ago

> One of Mutt's unusual strengths is that it actually displays message threads correctly. When people complain that they have trouble following email conversations involving groups of people, what they typically mean is that they are using a client such as Gmail that does not properly display the reply structure of email messages. When an email user hits the reply key, an In-Reply-To header should be added to the email. Mutt refers to these headers, and to the related References header, to keep track of which messages replied to what, and builds a tree to show the structure of the conversation. Some other mail clients attempt to construct this tree using only the Subject header This seems somehow wild to me. Why don't other email apps use the appropriate header fields? Why do they even try to use the subject field? Why do they insist on quoting the whole thread text below the message body? Why not do all this the proper way?

jiveturkey 6y ago
the only problem with this is that gmail does show the proper, header-referenced, thread structure. as well as subject “referenced”. anyway one shouldn’t blame gmail. it’s outlook that forced gmail’s hand. furthermore, like a bike vs car accident, you can be correct and still dead. mutts insistence of “keeping the thread” when users change the subject is “correct” yet still dead. 99% of users — aka normies — reply to an existing message when starting a new thread. changing the subject in almost all cases is intended to create a new thread, not a new subthread. one has to work with the users you have, not the users you wish you had.
- JNRowe 6y ago
  FWIW, in mutt tapping # on a message that should have been a new thread will make it such. And you can rejoin messages where people sent a new mail instead of a reply with &. Things like this, along with tools like t-prot¹, allow you to live the mail you want while still interacting with others ;) ¹ http://www.escape.de/~tolot/mutt/ http://www.escape.de/~tolot/mutt/
  - jiveturkey 6y ago
    i'm not criticizing mutt at all here. in fact i am going to try it out for awhile. i never used mutt back in the day, as i was always a gnus user. what i find fault with in the lwn article is the "attack" on gmail. gmail has its reasons for doing the things it does, good reasons. i actually liked mulberry quite a lot. especially the feature where 'reply' brings up an interstitial allowing you to select to/cc/bcc for each recipient. another aspect of email completely lost on normies. but it's day has passed.

bjarneh 6y ago

The amount of time I've spent on my old .muttrc file is almost embarrassing...