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I don’t know why, but all local email clients lately suck. Mutt sucks more, not less. They all get confused about your mailboxes having tens of thousands of mes
by WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
I don’t know why, but all local email clients lately suck. Mutt sucks more, not less. They all get confused about your mailboxes having tens of thousands of messages, an unavoidable side effect of your email provider giving you many gigabytes of email space. They all fuck up your threads. They all freeze while pulling another thousand of headers for that high-traffic mailing list. They all suck mightily at search. They all have a broken UI paradigm and show you the least important thing first.
Believe you me, I tried them all.
Actually, the only email client that sucked the least of them all was Microsoft Outlook. I’d never believe I’d admit it while sober, but here I am.
Now it looks like your email provider’s webmail is not that bad, unless it’s some sort of imap client on server (RoundCube, for example). It efficiently delivers a view into your whole mailbox without downloading the whole thing. Search works better. You define your email rules and they work at the source.
Dunno, man, the world sucks in general, and the world of email in particular.
- david_draco 4y agoHave a look at notmuch
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y agoAgreed. All I want is the ability to grep my mail.
- dspillett 4y agoI've done that when searching in-app has failed me, grepping through the mail store on a zimbra instance. Only useful for plain mail though, unless you are scanning headers not bodies. One day I might write a script to harvest IMAP accounts into a database (unpacking encodings on the way into the DB, and sitting a few other transforms & derivations where relevant like finding the local "received for" information and putting it in an efficiently searchable column, so things are easily located) so I can just SQL the crap out of it. Doing the same to a filesystem structure designed for easy getting might work if you'd prefer that.
- qudat 4y agoTry `magrep` from `mblaze`. All you need is a maildir. https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze
- taeric 4y agoI don't remember things being so bad back when IMAP was more popular. That and back when threaded messages were a thing. Nowadays, the way gmail shows threads is about the best I can expect. What happened? I don't know any reason that programs such as Mutt should have gotten bad.
- vxNsr 4y agoCan you explain the difference between threaded messages and what gmail does?
- WesolyKubeczek 4y agoGmail displays you a "conversation" where there's only one parent messages and threading is lost inside. It's bearable when conversation is more or less under control. But inside it, you lose, UI-wise, the information on who actually replied to whom. The only way you can infer that is if all participants have good quoting discipline.
- WesolyKubeczek 4y ago> What happened? I don't know any reason that programs such as Mutt should have gotten bad. If you have a mailbox with tens of thousands of messages and you also use mutt's IMAP capabilities, mutt's UI is going to freeze on you for prolonged periods of time. It also is trying very hard to be efficient and only download relevant stuff, but somehow it translates to "is downloading stuff all the time" (and freezes its UI while doing so). Basically you reproduce this by subscribing to a high-traffic mailing list, letting it send you stuff for a month, then trying to use Mutt on that. It also turns out that a maildir with all that stuff is also a stress test for your filesystem, so you add all deficiencies of email client to all deficiencies of your filesystem. Meh.
- taeric 4y agoCrap... Late to getting back to this. Newsgroups used to churn through a ton of messages. I don't remember them bogging down this badly. ;(
- z9znz 4y ago> the world sucks in general It does! But like the other HN post about software complexity, it has a lot to do with our ever-increasing expectations and demands. When email was just plain text, it was way easier to deal with. Now it's rare to receive an email which does not have and image or more in addition to the text (which itself may be plain and html (a non-standard, host+client specific subset of). I gave up on using email clients. I now just use web clients. Consequently I have 4 email websites I regularly use. But at least when crap fails, it's not a problem on my end, and there's no point in spending time to troubleshoot. Honestly, stuff rarely fails. Gmail website works for me usually. Zoho works always (or at least I've never caught it with a problem). Tutanota works mostly, sometimes awkwardly. Protonmail works as long as you understand it. My complaint is cloud storage. They all fall down, except for Tresorit; but it's rather expensive.
- int_19h 4y agoThe Bat!
- presto8 4y ago> Believe you me, I tried them all. I'm curious, what issues did you encounter with Thunderbird? I have found Thunderbird pretty wonderful overall. Using my Gmail as an example, I can select the "All Mail" folder (about 50,000 messages) and press Ctrl+Shift+K (for search) and it shows me results in just a few seconds. I use Thunderbird to manage multiple email accounts, and it has been a huge time saver having it all unified in one place.
- bsder 4y agoI like Thunderbird but sometimes it just gets ... stuck. I don't know of any better way to explain it. I presume that some networking thing hits its limits and needs to time out (generally DNS ... it's always DNS). After some mysterious amount of time, Thunderbird gets unstuck and continues on its merry way. The real problem, at the end of the day, is single-threaded GUI toolkits, though.
- presto8 4y agoI used to have some hangs as well, but then I played around with the compaction settings and that seemed to fix it. I think there is a settings option to add a prompt before compaction, and maybe modify the schedule. It would be a good feature if they would allow compaction to run in the middle of the night to avoid bothering the user.
- nmfisher 4y agoI dropped Thunderbird when my inbox reached a certain size. I can't remember exactly how many messages (probably 100k+), but not so many that I'd expect the whole thing to just grind to a halt.
- anfogoat 4y agoFor me, Thunderbird's number one defect is that it is unable to show threads unless you view all your accounts under one combined inbox. And it's not only a major defect but an absurd one as well.
- 4y ago
- qudat 4y agoI've been loving `mblaze`[1] lately after trying `aerc` for a few months. It's been a lot of fun using an email "client" that really emphasizes the unix philosophy. I don't have a ton of email in my primary address and I always reach inbox zero by the end of the evening. So ymmv. [1] https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze
- smorrebrod 4y agoInteresting! I'm curious to how it compares to MH? Have you tried both?
- lmm 4y agoWhat was the problem with KMail? I've found it consistently good but largely ignored by Americans (like most KDE programs, to be honest).
- brnt 4y ago+1 for Kmail. One detail I found is that it's underlying engine, Akonadi, is unstable/prone to unsolvable problems (I tried!). Debian stable's version is however, of course, rock steady.
- brnt 4y agoDid you try Mailspring? Positively surprised me. But Kmail still is my preferred mua.
- sound1 4y agoMailspring is great, simple, elegant and in my limited use, very functional.
- iKlsR 4y agoI used Mailspring with about 7 accounts (fastmail, outlook, gmail and yahoo) and it routinely fails to sync and I have to reconnect them. There is also this bug I've had for well over a year on windows where if you close the window it cannot catch focus and be maximized again, found a weird trick on the forums where you double click the taskbar icon to get it back. The latter was fine but getting kicked out and missing emails made me find an alt and so far so good with Thunderbird.