29 ms·

Mutt – Text-based mail client for Unix

174 points by ecliptik 4y ago

zeruch 4y ago
For some reason Mutt was the last terminal based email, and I still never liked it as much as Pine. This was a decade ago and I pretty much have since just used Thunderbird (or meh, Outlook) for email. I still hate most web clients...
ubermonkey 4y ago
I am honestly baffled by text-based mail clients in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Twenty Two.
- cylinder714 4y ago
  Speed. Particularly if you're a touch typist, keyboard commands like those in Pine/Alpine allow one to blaze through messages virtually at the speed of thought.
  - ubermonkey 4y ago
    I hear people say this, but shortcut keys for filing and whatnot exist in modern email clients, too. I can move through my mail without taking my hands off the keyboard in Outlook or in the naive Mac mail app just fine, and without having to use some other tool to see formatted mails or mails that contain images.
    - cylinder714 4y ago
      You're right, and I should have specified native clients versus web-based ones. But text-based UIs are especially fast ;-)
      - ubermonkey 4y ago
        Yeah, I cannot imagine dealing with mail in a browser full time. The UX and speed are HORRIBLE vs. a native client.
leephillips 4y ago
Why I use mutt, and why it’s better than anything else: https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/ https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/
- gradschool 4y ago
  What's your take on mutt versus neomutt? https://neomutt.org/ https://neomutt.org/
  - leephillips 4y ago
    Neomutt is a fork of Mutt that adds some features. Some of these features are available as Mutt enhancements, and some have been added to Mutt since the fork. I have no interest in these particular features, so I’ve never used Neomutt. One comment on my LWN article claimed that Neomutt was increasingly buggy. I don’t know if that’s (still) true, but original Mutt has been rock-solid for me. Correctness and stability are crucial in an email client.
    - minusf 4y ago
      while mutt i think never crashed on me, it's imap implementation was far from pleasant to use. i do not know how much of that might have been because of server side, but in the end i moved on to mbsync instead of using the built-in imap syncing. now mutt is a top notch ui over a local maildir.
- cduzz 4y ago
  Actually, there was a better mail user's shell, mush[1], that was ultimately murdered by its insane license[2] which forbade any modification to the source; I remember trying to puzzle through how to apply the various patches I'd found to make it compile and then do useful things. Sad, but a good lesson in how a bad license on good code kills the program. (links to the netbsd copy of the code since I can't find a more reasonable project home, likely because terrible license) 1. http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/mail/mush/index.html http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/mail/mush/in... 2. http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/licenses/mush-license http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/licenses/mus...
0daystock 4y ago
It's crazy how mutt still doesn't have native oauth support. I now there's external scripts, but this is a common authentication standard which is being neglected by developers. I wonder how many mutt users actually degrade account security to make their clients work without realizing the mistake.
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  I feel the same. Supporting several methods of authentication is not selling out to big corporations, is part of being a modern software. Software doesn't need a GUI to be modern.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  I use an application password with mutt (really neomutt). IMO this is not a significant degradation in my security posture: the application password is scoped, and mutt executes my password manager to retrieve it. Supporting OAuth would be good, but I also understand perfectly why they don’t: it’s not part of the standards. If Google wants universal adoption, they should go through a standards track rather than throwing their weight around. And again, I say that as someone who would gladly use OAuth in mutt.
  - 0daystock 4y ago
    How is the application password "scoped"? Can I not retrieve your Drive, Photos and Hangouts content with the same credential you generated for Gmail? Unless you're using OAuth, I believe I most certainly can.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      Hmm, it looks like I was wrong about that. I remember scoping it, but maybe that was just me naming the password in Google's UI. So yes, it looks like it's roughly equivalent to a normal Google login (but without the 2FA requirements?). That's too bad.
      - 4y ago
merricksb 4y ago
Several significant discussions about Mutt in the past couple years (and earlier): https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mutt.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mutt.org
igetspam 4y ago
I used pine religiously until Gmail had keyboard shortcuts. Now I just can't get myself back into it. I applaud those who are still functioning with text based mail clients. At this point, it feels like a real effort of love and I can absolutely get behind that.
- tiben_ 4y ago
  +1 cli dogma has limits. I now use Gnome/Evolution which just "works"
  - jethro_tell 4y ago
    * for your usecase, congrats!
    - tiben_ 4y ago
      I think it answer needs of a lot of people myself included.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  I guess it depends on your emails. If you need graphics/formatting then yeah text-mode clients are a questionable pick. If you mostly deal with text, then they remain much nicer to use than "modern" alternatives.
- jacobsenscott 4y ago
  All these text only mail tools are fine for reading mail, but if you need to actually send mail most likely your recipients are seeing some nearly unreadable email. No modern mail reader does well with plain text email. Most likely it doesn't wrap properly on small screens (phone) for example so they are scrolling horizontally. It doesn't wrap properly on large screens (they are seeing a narrow 80 or less character wide tower of text). If you are bottom posting most likely the recipient doesn't even scroll down and see it. If you are top posting plain texts probably break the ability for the reader to collapse the rest of the thread underneath and scatters > characters all over. The mail reader is probably choosing some nasty fixed width font. I say this as someone who spent too many hours trying to send email with emacs and being embarrassed by the terrible results. In the end you need to hack in some markdown to html converter and write all your mail in markdown if you want any chance of a readable email. Mutt, emacs, whatever. They are fine mail readers. But you really can't write actual professional emails in them anymore.
briandoll 4y ago
I built a fantasy football app in 1998 for WDVE in Pittsburgh, PA and had to act as the "Commissioner" to handle all disputes, complaints, and other interesting feedback, all via email, and as a person who couldn't give a shit about Football and never watched a game. The backend was all perl, pulling data from stats.com or something like that. But the only way any of this was possible, was using terminal-based email (pine, not mutt, but similar enough). Terminal-based email is a great example of a tool optimized for power users, and I'm realizing now that most of what I was able to do in Pine in 1998 I still can not do with any "modern" email client (I pay for Superhuman these days, which is still a far cry).
- thejammahimself 4y ago
  Out of interest, what sort of ways did pine help you in that sort of job?
  - briandoll 4y ago
    Firstly, speed. Opening that mailbox with a GUI-based email application on a developer desktop was orders of magnitude slower, if it opened at all. The volume was just far more than most desktop email apps was used to at the time. Secondly, it's unix, so you're operating a tool that allows you to construct ad-hoc workflows very quickly. There was a scoring bug where the stats software (literally a pipe-delimited text file that was updated by midnight the day of the game) had given a safety to the wrong player with the same name. I had hundreds of emails complaining about this bug, and I needed to fix it. I can search in Pine, find a result set (ie. everyone who mentioned this players unique name), compose an email to all of them (BCCd), and pull in a text file as the email body that I'd written previously, that explained how and when this would be fixed. I had TONS of canned email responses, saved as text files, so finding a set of emails, and sending replies w/ the contents from a saved text file, was a very routine workflow that happened dozens of times a day for various situations. I knew nothing about american football really, but with perl and pine, I felt like there was nothing I couldn't do.
    - thejammahimself 4y ago
lawn 4y ago
I've always wanted to try Mutt, but from the outside it seems quite daunting. Is there a beginners guide on how to get the essentials? What plugins should I use to get, say, similar experience as Gmail/Fastmail? Should I use Neomutt?
- kseistrup 4y ago
  If you use mutt-wizzard[1] to set up neomutt, you'll be up and running in no time. Edit: typo [1]: https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/mutt-wizard https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/mutt-wizard
  - ninjin 4y ago
    Honestly, I find it easier to start from something minimal, read man pages, and then gradually make the setup more complex, rather than start from a massive heap of settings handed down from someone else.
- layer8 4y ago
  When I started using mutt ~25 years ago, I took one or two afternoons to read through the manual and to configure everything the way I wanted. That was a good time investment. I rarely changed anything since then. :)
whartung 4y ago
What is the "plain text" email world like right now? We (I) get so much HTML email, massive amounts of top posting, "quote the entire thread", etc. etc., just curious what the plain text email experience is like in this day and age?
- thenewwazoo 4y ago
  > What is the "plain text" email world like right now? A barren, lonely place filled with frustration and populated with creaky relics such as ourselves, yelling at clouds.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  It's mostly fine for me. I've given up on fighting against top-posting, but most emails still contain a plain text copy and I've never had anyone complain about me responding in plain text.
- iib 4y ago
  When I tried to setup mutt for email, I saw some online tutorial advising the `elinks -dump` parameter, from a lynx-like browser. HTML emails were much more readable than in their original form.
- thejammahimself 4y ago
  A lot of the emails I get that come from discussion mailing lists tend to be in plain text format, and they look fine. Some mailing lists also insist on plain text as I recall. I think gmail sends its emails in both plain text, and HTML so if I get an email in my organisation (which 9 times / 10 will normally be sent from gmail) it'll look fine. The only HTML emails I get tend to be newsletters from places like The Guardian, and I normally have to open them in a browser because they just don't look right looking at them straight from neomutt. I don't know about you but I don't tend to get bothered too much when I get sent a HTML email because neomutt will normally use lynx to format it into plain text that can be read from a terminal. Lynx isn't very good for browsing the web but its better for this sort of purpose. I'd, of course, rather people use plain text more for email because I reckon a lot of the HTML emails I see really don't need to have been written in HTML at all. Although the only issue is that HTML emails generated from software sometimes look horrendous in neomutt which is slightly annoying.
BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
I've been using Aerc, works well for me. Has anyone tried both, and if so, what's your preference? https://aerc-mail.org https://aerc-mail.org
- ninjin 4y ago
  Last time I tried aerc (some time over a year ago), mutt had better threading and I stayed with mutt. Having read the aerc source and used it though, it comes across as a very nice modern take on a TUI MUA.
- igemnace 4y ago
  I use both. I mainly still keep mutt for encryption and signing. For general, day-to-day use, I prefer aerc because I grok its configuration more -- I believe one of its key advantages is its simplicity of configuration. I find it much easier to think of a keybind or string of commands to make some menial task faster. aerc still crashes on me from time to time. Not too much that I'm turned off from it, but definitely enough that I feel it's less stable than mutt. I also find it easier to work with attachments in general with mutt: picking which attachment to view and piping it into different programs.
  - gnull 4y ago
    Aerc has rolled out signing and encryption support recently. I've tested signing, seems to work fine. And now it uses normal GPG keystore, not its own.
- hectorhector 4y ago
  Has Aerc added support for email threads yet? I tried it when it first came out and that was my biggest disappointment.
  - gnull 4y ago
    Aerc can display a thread in a tree-view of a directory, yes. Run :toggle-threads to see it (I'm using Maildir backend). Using notmuch backend, one could also have a key to display all the emails that are in the same thread as the current one, so that you get a nice conversation-like view which includes sent emails as well (Purebred does this by default, for example). This is not supported out of the box yet, but I'm thinking of implementing a patch for it in the coming weeks.
teeray 4y ago
Anybody have good guides for using mutt with Gmail and Microsoft 365? The modern authentication requirements make configuring it onerous IIRC.
- theophrastus 4y ago
  After gmail recently greeted my mutt/IMAP request (which had worked perfectly for over a decade!) with "login failed", i've embarked upon the slow winding road to getting mutt to use OAuth2, or is it OAUTHBEARER?, for gmail. Out of a dozen or so hints spanning the last couple of years (many which depend on having python2 still around), i'd humbly promote these links to best hints: [1] http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~jacobd/posts/2022/03/configure-mutt-to-work-with-oauth-20/ http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~jacobd/posts/2022/03/configure-mut... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/backtickbot/comments/kyuq11/httpsnpredditcomrlinuxcommentskyhr5owhat_email/ https://www.reddit.com/r/backtickbot/comments/kyuq11/httpsnp... Please post any better sites you discover. It really is an overly server specific mess.
  - miguelitosd 4y ago
    The other option, per a couple sites like: https://gist.github.com/bnagy/8914f712f689cc01c267 https://gist.github.com/bnagy/8914f712f689cc01c267 I set up application passwords, then configure a gmail rc file ~/.muttrc.gmail with the important bits: source "gpg -d ~/.pass/gmail-mutt.asc|" set from="ME@gmail.com" set spoolfile="imaps://imap.gmail.com/INBOX" set folder="imaps://imap.gmail.com/" set postponed="imaps://imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Drafts" and the GPG encrypted file has the following: set imap_user="ME" set imap_pass="APP_PASSWORD" set imap_idle="yes" set smtp_url="smtps://ME@gmail.com:APP_PASSWORD@smtp.gmail.com:465/' I wrapped a simple gmail command to run: mutt -F ~/.muttrc.gmail GPG pops up a password prompt, then mutt does it's thing and works just fine.
tiben_ 4y ago
I tried and used it 10 years ago in my 20's period were i discoreved the joyful of terminal world. But as of today, no.. it is not sustainable in professional world. As Vim which i used to love for years, but now i must admit IntelliJ simply does the work... mutt, for a mail tool is simply not plug and play. have no time now to deal with configuration files, proxy tools and so on to deal with such a simple thing like sending an email. Please note i'm not bashing mutt, its a great peace of code
- leephillips 4y ago
  “it is not sustainable in professional world” Huh? I use email for all my important communication, and Mutt is the only client that is powerful and convenient enough.
  - tiben_ 4y ago
    With common email providers like gmail, live.com and so on, you have to configure IMAP proxies with is just an headache for this specific use case. Not to speak about real life use case were the email is HTML formatted with images. mutt, as far as i know is rooted to Unix local email handling. Which is not very friendly when used with common web providers 99% people use today In 2022, I love linux and command line. But mutt is outside the limit i can tolerate about this dogma.
    - leephillips 4y ago
      I think you’re mistaken. Mutt works fine with IMAP servers. It’s quite flexible. In the small minority of cases when I need to see the email in a full-blown web browser, it takes two keystrokes to open it there.
      - tiben_ 4y ago
        I know this. i've spent a lot of time years ago to configure mutt to fetch my gmail/hotmail/free accounts and it worked pretty well. But when you change computer hardware what a hassle to reconfigure everything. Such a simple thing like sending email should now be a no-brainer. i quit this dogma to use my brain for more insighful things
kristianpaul 4y ago
I've been using mutt , screen/byobu, vim/spf13, newsboat, getmail, procmail, weechat and irssi for a while now, nice text-based workspace combo.
guessbest 4y ago
Is today the day that YN posts every non-mainstream email client to distract from the collapsing tech sector? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31691783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31691783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31690699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31690699
- macrolocal 4y ago
  Wait-- Mutt is not mainstream?
- riedel 4y ago
  Still waiting for the elm 2.6 release to post it :)
- krzyk 4y ago
  collapsing tech sector?
- em-bee 4y ago
  interesting to note, slypheed was posted first, 13 hours ago. it took about 8 hours to reach 50 points and now has 69 points and 21 comments. claws was posted 3 hours later and reached 50 points 2 hours before slypheed, only about 3 hours after posting and now has 122 points and 72 comments. finally mutt was posted 5 hours ago, and reached 50 points after only about 1.5 hours and now has 134 points and 122 comments. you may draw your own conclusions.
  - em-bee 4y ago
    sup was posted two hours after mutt and took about 11 hours to get 50 points
- em-bee 4y ago
  two more: Sup – A curses threads-with-tags style email client https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31696235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31696235 Mu4e – Emacs email client backed by Xapian https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31696199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31696199
ilovecaching 4y ago
Mutt's downfall is it's designed around a single account. Most people have at least a personal and work email account, if not more. People also access their email through IMAP these days. Mutt has many config hacks to try and make it load multiple IMAP accounts, but a single failure to auth or connect will leave mutt completely frozen. I have to use mutt to read and pull kernel patches, but I hate it. I would love a modern tui email client to rise from the ashes, but I doubt that will ever happen.
- em-bee 4y ago
  when i switched to sup, it was a paradigm change in terms of interfaces compared to mutt. i can't say how well it works with imap though because i don't use that feature.
- WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
  Not only that. It's still built around that ancient concept that users connect via TTYs to a single machine, and mail is actually moving mail locally to their /var/spool/mail/%u, no network involved. In fact, this is also what all self-hosted email guides expect in Anno Fucking Domini 2022! I don't want to have to create system users just so they can have their mailboxes! Somebody tell those guys that such defaults are not sensible in this age.
- mechanicalpulse 4y ago
  I use fetchmail+procmail for IMAP. I have no problem with freezing or multiple accounts.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Mutt is not single account, mutt is account-agnostic. Dump your email to one mailbox or a thousand, and it'll process those according to your configuration setting(s). It's possible to configure mutt to handle multiple accounts by: - Dumping accounts to independent mailboxes and accessing through through specific mutt configurations. - Dumping accounts to independent folders and Using folder-hook to set account-specific configurations. - Performing other configurations based on reciepient and/or sender.
dsr_ 4y ago
If you manage large amounts of email (100K+ messages in a mailbox, 1K+ messages a day), mutt is the only reasonable choice. If you miss mh/nmh and wish that it had a wrapper that could do everything and made sense, mutt is your savior. If you work with people who think that changing the colors and fonts in a message is a good way of clarifying what they are responding to, go find different people to work with. If you need to spend several minutes synthesizing a reply from a bunch of different messages all of which should be on-screen at once, (a) you have my sympathies, and (b) yes, you need a GUI mail client.
- tephra 4y ago
  Mutt is indeed good but as a gnus user I'd have to disagree that it is the _only_ reasonable option ;)
  - dig1 4y ago
    As an emacs + notmuch [1] user, I'll agree with you :) [1] https://notmuchmail.org/ https://notmuchmail.org/
  - spear 4y ago
    Yeah, I've been using Gnus for more than 25 years, although I now use mbsync to download e-mail first. Before that, I used the original GNUS for Usenet and VM for e-mail.
    - ylee 4y ago
      27 years on VM here (currently 8.2.0b), using fetchmail to download mail locally. I tried Gnus a couple of times for Usenet but never stuck with it because of Emacs's lack of multithreading. I've never tried Gnus for email because VM has always met my needs. It does an amazingly good job rendering HTML mail into something readable on a text terminal (the way I use VM and Emacs), complete with keyboard-navigable links that VM sends to an external web browser, and for the few times I need to see the actual graphics, a single keystroke sends the message's source to said browser. Personality Crisis (which is nowadays included with VM, as opposed to being separate back when you used it) automatically rewrites the From: line based on the message I'm replying to. Using BBDB, Personality Crisis also does so when creating a new message based on the recipient. Mairix handles superfast searching of my decades of mail archives. You know this of course, but I can't overstate to other people how nice being able to modify/extend VM with Elisp is. I rewrote the link-navigation code to handle all link types, and wrote the code that the abovementioned single keystroke invokes. VM isn't perfect. I know that I could do all of the above with Gnus, and quite possibly am missing out on other features that VM lacks. Overall, though, I really feel like I have a superpower for email handling with it.
em-bee 4y ago
i don't remember when i started using mutt, but i sat at a table with michael elkins at LUG meetings, and tried to be funny by saying "i didn't write mutt, it was me" i have been using mutt for more than a decade after that, until i discovered sup (supmua). for me one of mutts's big weaknesses (and that of every other commandline client) was that it could only keep one mail folder open at one time. at some point i had four instances of mutt running in parallel in multiple screen/tmux windows so that i could switch between folders without having to reopen each one. sup fixed that by allowing me to open multiple views and keeping state while switching between them. it also replaces folders with tags and an extensive search interface with saved searches that can be treated like virtual folders. i haven't looked back. sup inspired notmuch, that brings the search feature to other mail clients (including neomutt) but i don't know if neomutt also keeps state between views. i am sticking with sup because of that.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  I use notmuch on Emacs (yes, found it after seeing sup). For those who don't want to use Emacs, notmuch has other clients: https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/ https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/ alot was one of the early ones and last I checked (years ago) was quite featureful. For people who want something other than mutt, I strongly recommend something based on notmuch. It also comes with Python bindings so it's easy to write complex rules to filter incoming email.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    I also use notmuch and emacs. I have always preferred text email clients. The first one I used was elm, then pine, then I was using gnus for a while but treating mail as news wasn't quite right. Switched to mutt, then back to emacs w/notmuch (using w3m to render HTML emails) and that has been the best for me for a number of years.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    I use notmuch as well (with astroid as frontend), but I definitely think there are 2 big issues: 1. All clients except for the Emacs one are quite unfinished and development slowed down for quite a few of them. 2. Using it with multiple computers is not working well. I use two computers and am travelling often (so need offline access to my mail so can't just ssh into one machine). I have been using muchsync with an additional server (as the other computers are not always connected). The server syncs to the work exchange server using mbsync. That sort of works, but is brittle and sometimes things get out of sync (I had to search the the muchsync sqlite database recently to delete an entry) or break. I tried other solutions (e.g. sync the notmuch db using syncthing) but broke even more often. It gets even worse if you also use your phone for email like I do (you essentially have no search on the phone). I think it is quite obvious that notmuch was designed by developers who use a single computer and don't travel much and don't see much value in mail on multiple devices. I really wish jmap would have better adoption because a jmap server with some local cache for offline work (similar to how e.g. mutt handles IMAP) would be the best solution IMO.
user3939382 4y ago
I tried to commit to mutt but, the vast majority of emails I receive are HTML based which means you have to launch and open a new web browser window to view almost every email. This was a total PITA.
- rinze 4y ago
  It depends. Most HTML e-mail can be parsed within the mutt viewer using an external program that converts HTML -> text in a graceful way. That works for 99 % of the HTML e-mail (which is typically just people that send it that way because they don't know better.) For newsletters and such, you can have a shortcut that opens the HTML portion in a browser tab automatically. This is done by adding this to your ~/.mailcap: text/html; mutt_bgrun /usr/bin/firefox %s >/dev/null 2>&1; needsterminal text/html; elinks -dump ; copiousoutput (where `mutt_bgrun` is here: https://www.mattcutts.com/files/mutt_bgrun https://www.mattcutts.com/files/mutt_bgrun) And then on ~/.muttrc: macro index,pager ,b "<view-attachments>/html<enter><view-mailcap><exit>" "View first HTML attachment in browser" That way, if I'm on an e-mail and I want the actual HTML rendering, I hit ",b" and it goes to a browser tab.
  - jwilk 4y ago
    If you really want to view mails in Firefox, you should do this in a dedicated profile that has JavaScript and outgoing connections disabled.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
      What’s the impact of not disabling JavaScript?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- twic 4y ago
  Weird. The vast majority of emails i get (which i actually want to read) work fine in Alpine. Either they have a plain text version, or Alpine is rendering the HTML, i'm not sure which. Who is sending you these obligate HTML emails?
howeyc 4y ago
Question for terminal email users. What do you use on mobile? Do you not bother having email access on your phone? Or do you ssh into a tmux session somewhere? Or do you have a client on your phone in addition to using terminal at the desk.
- rinze 4y ago
  I use mutt on my desktop just because for my use case it's the best tool for the job, and have the regular Fastmail app on the phone.
- stevekemp 4y ago
  When I used mutt I'd SSH into my mailserver. Make would be delivered to ~/Maildir, and that's where I'd read it from. That said the host would also run dovecot and allow reading via IMAP if there was ever a need to access things remotely.
- shakna 4y ago
  The same thing I use on my desktop. I run a CLI on my Android. Termux had to move more exclusively to F-droid because of some Play Store changes, but I was already using F-droid so that made exactly no difference to me.
- em-bee 4y ago
  i deliberately don't have email on my phone, because i really don't want to deal with longer messages there. also i don't want to use the phone for work. i use it for messaging, but anything that needs a longer response i prefer to write on a real keyboard. not having email on the phone allows me to limit phone use to short quick responses. anything else can wait.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  I don't read email from my phone. I am on android, and I have a gmail account for that, but I don't ever read it or use it for anything else.
- sam_lowry_ 4y ago
  K-9 Mail
rsync 4y ago
alpine user here. I can't imagine mouse-mousing around to deal with email. Further, in 2022, I still find myself (albeit rarely) in low-bandwidth environments where an email client suitable for a 9600 baud modem comes in handy. But perhaps most interesting: When I send email to other rsync.net employees, it never traverses the Internet. They are logged in, via ssh, to our mailserver as am I. The content of the emails transmits only as (ephemeral) characters in a terminal and the data transfer over the Internet exists only as ssh. This pleases me greatly ...
throw0101a 4y ago
How is the OAUTH support nowadays on (neo)mutt? More and more 'webmail' systems seem to mandate it.
emkemp 4y ago
From the man page on http://www.mutt.org/doc/mutt.1.txt http://www.mutt.org/doc/mutt.1.txt BUGS None. Mutts have fleas, not bugs.
a-dub 4y ago
mutt was notable for it's automatic threading support. personally i found it interesting but had an emotional attachment to pine. i suspect that the threading support in gmail was probably inspired by mutt.
qudat 4y ago
After dabbling with `aerc` I've moved to `mblaze` which has been a blast to work with. It really emphasizes the unix philosophy and allows for composition of commands. https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze I've started cataloging all the terminal mail clients in a list: https://erock.lists.sh/terminal-mail-clients https://erock.lists.sh/terminal-mail-clients Happy to add others if people know of some that I've missed.
- ashton314 4y ago
  Would you count mu and mu4e? https://github.com/djcb/mu https://github.com/djcb/mu
  - qudat 4y ago
    Added, thanks!
    - asdfqwertzxcv 4y ago
      Also gotta add notmuch and some more of the other frontends - https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/ https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/
      - qudat 4y ago
        done!
- jolmg 4y ago
  Thanks for recommending mblaze. Nearly all terminal mail clients use a TUI. It's nice to see a client besides nmh that uses a CLI instead. > Happy to add others if people know of some that I've missed. Here are a couple of lists with clients you're missing: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications#Email_clients https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications#Email_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients
djdeutschebahn 4y ago
I think the authors quote on the top of the page was potential inspiration of this website https://tools.suckless.org https://tools.suckless.org and it's tools. The suckless.org url showed up multiple times in hn-search, but they did not get upvotes like this one. As I understand it's pretty low-level stuff. But I find surf (browser) quite compelling, mostly because of default no-tabs and full screen for less distraction.
mechanicalpulse 4y ago
Mutt remains my primary email client to this day. I use procmail for filtering and mu for indexing/searching.
mbreese 4y ago
Of course this has to get posted on a Friday. And so thus begins my biannual experiment of trying to convert my mail usage over to Mutt. Every so often I try to convert back to Mutt from webmail. Every time I enjoy the process, but end up switching back. Part of the friction was supporting multiple imap accounts (Google and Office365). I know it’s possible, but there was still friction. However, given the hoops I have to jump through to even get my Office 365 webmail nowadays, I’m not entirely sure a text based email client is even possible. Which is sad.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  What specifically do you get hung up on? For multiple IMAP accounts, you can employ mutt's folder-hook settings. - Use an IMAP sync tool (offlineimap, imapsync, and others). Yes, mutt has its own tools for accessing accounts, IME you're better off to use a third-party tool. - Dump those accounts to independent folders, generally. There are options for integrating / sorting mail as it arrives, including procmail and mailtool. If you prefer a single integrated inbox, that's also an option. Mutt has numerous hook options to set values based on folder, which can be used to set various parameters. Alternatively, you can also set specific configuration files to apply to specific folders. Your personal, work, and anonymous email profiles are each independent in this way.
pge 4y ago
I used mutt for awhile but ultimately switched away from it because of two issues that came up a lot: * calendar invitations (google or outlook calendar). I could not find any program that could process the invitation, respond and save to my calendar, so I had to handle calendar invitations on my phone. I looked into writing something myself (the CALDAV protocol is plain text and not overly complicated) but never got around to it. * HTML emails -as others have noted, w3m is pretty good at rendering most emails but not all. The ones that it didn't render to plaintext well were annoying and required opening a browser to view them. Outside of those issues, it worked great with davmail grabbing email from an exchange server, and offlineimap saving mail locally.
dang 4y ago
Related: Mutt 2.2.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317229 - Feb 2022 (16 comments) Mutt releases version 2.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25222166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25222166 - Nov 2020 (40 comments) Mutt and Gmail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25156796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25156796 - Nov 2020 (4 comments) Mutt 2.0 Release Notes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25019901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25019901 - Nov 2020 (76 comments) Mutt email client 25 years old - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173676 - Aug 2020 (158 comments) Using Gmail with Mutt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23130859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23130859 - May 2020 (1 comment) Patch Workflow with Mutt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20694586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20694586 - Aug 2019 (1 comment) Using gmail with mutt (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16962136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16962136 - April 2018 (18 comments) Switching to the Mutt Email Client - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14567074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14567074 - June 2017 (241 comments) Using Gmail with Mutt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12563398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12563398 - Sept 2016 (53 comments) Mutt 1.7.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12324506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12324506 - Aug 2016 (90 comments) Mutt 1.6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11425642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11425642 - April 2016 (183 comments) Why Some Security Experts Use Mutt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182582 - Sept 2015 (157 comments) The Homely Mutt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4597156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4597156 - Oct 2012 (110 comments) Using Mutt with Gmail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1469915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1469915 - June 2010 (7 comments)
tpoacher 4y ago
is it possible to use these to access work email, which requires MFA to access?

174 points by ecliptik 4y ago

For some reason Mutt was the last terminal based email, and I still never liked it as much as Pine. This was a decade ago and I pretty much have since just used Thunderbird (or meh, Outlook) for email. I still hate most web clients...

ubermonkey 4y ago

I am honestly baffled by text-based mail clients in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Twenty Two.

cylinder714 4y ago
Speed. Particularly if you're a touch typist, keyboard commands like those in Pine/Alpine allow one to blaze through messages virtually at the speed of thought.
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  I hear people say this, but shortcut keys for filing and whatnot exist in modern email clients, too. I can move through my mail without taking my hands off the keyboard in Outlook or in the naive Mac mail app just fine, and without having to use some other tool to see formatted mails or mails that contain images.
  - cylinder714 4y ago
    You're right, and I should have specified native clients versus web-based ones. But text-based UIs are especially fast ;-)
    - ubermonkey 4y ago
      Yeah, I cannot imagine dealing with mail in a browser full time. The UX and speed are HORRIBLE vs. a native client.

leephillips 4y ago

Why I use mutt, and why it’s better than anything else: https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/ https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/

gradschool 4y ago
What's your take on mutt versus neomutt? https://neomutt.org/ https://neomutt.org/
- leephillips 4y ago
  Neomutt is a fork of Mutt that adds some features. Some of these features are available as Mutt enhancements, and some have been added to Mutt since the fork. I have no interest in these particular features, so I’ve never used Neomutt. One comment on my LWN article claimed that Neomutt was increasingly buggy. I don’t know if that’s (still) true, but original Mutt has been rock-solid for me. Correctness and stability are crucial in an email client.
  - minusf 4y ago
    while mutt i think never crashed on me, it's imap implementation was far from pleasant to use. i do not know how much of that might have been because of server side, but in the end i moved on to mbsync instead of using the built-in imap syncing. now mutt is a top notch ui over a local maildir.
cduzz 4y ago
Actually, there was a better mail user's shell, mush[1], that was ultimately murdered by its insane license[2] which forbade any modification to the source; I remember trying to puzzle through how to apply the various patches I'd found to make it compile and then do useful things. Sad, but a good lesson in how a bad license on good code kills the program. (links to the netbsd copy of the code since I can't find a more reasonable project home, likely because terrible license) 1. http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/mail/mush/index.html http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/mail/mush/in... 2. http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/licenses/mush-license http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/licenses/mus...

0daystock 4y ago

It's crazy how mutt still doesn't have native oauth support. I now there's external scripts, but this is a common authentication standard which is being neglected by developers. I wonder how many mutt users actually degrade account security to make their clients work without realizing the mistake.

ASalazarMX 4y ago
I feel the same. Supporting several methods of authentication is not selling out to big corporations, is part of being a modern software. Software doesn't need a GUI to be modern.
woodruffw 4y ago
I use an application password with mutt (really neomutt). IMO this is not a significant degradation in my security posture: the application password is scoped, and mutt executes my password manager to retrieve it. Supporting OAuth would be good, but I also understand perfectly why they don’t: it’s not part of the standards. If Google wants universal adoption, they should go through a standards track rather than throwing their weight around. And again, I say that as someone who would gladly use OAuth in mutt.
- 0daystock 4y ago
  How is the application password "scoped"? Can I not retrieve your Drive, Photos and Hangouts content with the same credential you generated for Gmail? Unless you're using OAuth, I believe I most certainly can.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    Hmm, it looks like I was wrong about that. I remember scoping it, but maybe that was just me naming the password in Google's UI. So yes, it looks like it's roughly equivalent to a normal Google login (but without the 2FA requirements?). That's too bad.
    - 4y ago

merricksb 4y ago

Several significant discussions about Mutt in the past couple years (and earlier): https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mutt.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mutt.org

igetspam 4y ago

I used pine religiously until Gmail had keyboard shortcuts. Now I just can't get myself back into it. I applaud those who are still functioning with text based mail clients. At this point, it feels like a real effort of love and I can absolutely get behind that.

tiben_ 4y ago
+1 cli dogma has limits. I now use Gnome/Evolution which just "works"
- jethro_tell 4y ago
  * for your usecase, congrats!
  - tiben_ 4y ago
    I think it answer needs of a lot of people myself included.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
I guess it depends on your emails. If you need graphics/formatting then yeah text-mode clients are a questionable pick. If you mostly deal with text, then they remain much nicer to use than "modern" alternatives.
jacobsenscott 4y ago
All these text only mail tools are fine for reading mail, but if you need to actually send mail most likely your recipients are seeing some nearly unreadable email. No modern mail reader does well with plain text email. Most likely it doesn't wrap properly on small screens (phone) for example so they are scrolling horizontally. It doesn't wrap properly on large screens (they are seeing a narrow 80 or less character wide tower of text). If you are bottom posting most likely the recipient doesn't even scroll down and see it. If you are top posting plain texts probably break the ability for the reader to collapse the rest of the thread underneath and scatters > characters all over. The mail reader is probably choosing some nasty fixed width font. I say this as someone who spent too many hours trying to send email with emacs and being embarrassed by the terrible results. In the end you need to hack in some markdown to html converter and write all your mail in markdown if you want any chance of a readable email. Mutt, emacs, whatever. They are fine mail readers. But you really can't write actual professional emails in them anymore.

briandoll 4y ago

I built a fantasy football app in 1998 for WDVE in Pittsburgh, PA and had to act as the "Commissioner" to handle all disputes, complaints, and other interesting feedback, all via email, and as a person who couldn't give a shit about Football and never watched a game. The backend was all perl, pulling data from stats.com or something like that. But the only way any of this was possible, was using terminal-based email (pine, not mutt, but similar enough). Terminal-based email is a great example of a tool optimized for power users, and I'm realizing now that most of what I was able to do in Pine in 1998 I still can not do with any "modern" email client (I pay for Superhuman these days, which is still a far cry).

thejammahimself 4y ago
Out of interest, what sort of ways did pine help you in that sort of job?
- briandoll 4y ago
  Firstly, speed. Opening that mailbox with a GUI-based email application on a developer desktop was orders of magnitude slower, if it opened at all. The volume was just far more than most desktop email apps was used to at the time. Secondly, it's unix, so you're operating a tool that allows you to construct ad-hoc workflows very quickly. There was a scoring bug where the stats software (literally a pipe-delimited text file that was updated by midnight the day of the game) had given a safety to the wrong player with the same name. I had hundreds of emails complaining about this bug, and I needed to fix it. I can search in Pine, find a result set (ie. everyone who mentioned this players unique name), compose an email to all of them (BCCd), and pull in a text file as the email body that I'd written previously, that explained how and when this would be fixed. I had TONS of canned email responses, saved as text files, so finding a set of emails, and sending replies w/ the contents from a saved text file, was a very routine workflow that happened dozens of times a day for various situations. I knew nothing about american football really, but with perl and pine, I felt like there was nothing I couldn't do.
  - thejammahimself 4y ago

lawn 4y ago

I've always wanted to try Mutt, but from the outside it seems quite daunting. Is there a beginners guide on how to get the essentials? What plugins should I use to get, say, similar experience as Gmail/Fastmail? Should I use Neomutt?

kseistrup 4y ago
If you use mutt-wizzard[1] to set up neomutt, you'll be up and running in no time. Edit: typo [1]: https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/mutt-wizard https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/mutt-wizard
- ninjin 4y ago
  Honestly, I find it easier to start from something minimal, read man pages, and then gradually make the setup more complex, rather than start from a massive heap of settings handed down from someone else.
layer8 4y ago
When I started using mutt ~25 years ago, I took one or two afternoons to read through the manual and to configure everything the way I wanted. That was a good time investment. I rarely changed anything since then. :)

whartung 4y ago

What is the "plain text" email world like right now? We (I) get so much HTML email, massive amounts of top posting, "quote the entire thread", etc. etc., just curious what the plain text email experience is like in this day and age?

thenewwazoo 4y ago
> What is the "plain text" email world like right now? A barren, lonely place filled with frustration and populated with creaky relics such as ourselves, yelling at clouds.
woodruffw 4y ago
It's mostly fine for me. I've given up on fighting against top-posting, but most emails still contain a plain text copy and I've never had anyone complain about me responding in plain text.
iib 4y ago
When I tried to setup mutt for email, I saw some online tutorial advising the `elinks -dump` parameter, from a lynx-like browser. HTML emails were much more readable than in their original form.
thejammahimself 4y ago
A lot of the emails I get that come from discussion mailing lists tend to be in plain text format, and they look fine. Some mailing lists also insist on plain text as I recall. I think gmail sends its emails in both plain text, and HTML so if I get an email in my organisation (which 9 times / 10 will normally be sent from gmail) it'll look fine. The only HTML emails I get tend to be newsletters from places like The Guardian, and I normally have to open them in a browser because they just don't look right looking at them straight from neomutt. I don't know about you but I don't tend to get bothered too much when I get sent a HTML email because neomutt will normally use lynx to format it into plain text that can be read from a terminal. Lynx isn't very good for browsing the web but its better for this sort of purpose. I'd, of course, rather people use plain text more for email because I reckon a lot of the HTML emails I see really don't need to have been written in HTML at all. Although the only issue is that HTML emails generated from software sometimes look horrendous in neomutt which is slightly annoying.

BaculumMeumEst 4y ago

I've been using Aerc, works well for me. Has anyone tried both, and if so, what's your preference? https://aerc-mail.org https://aerc-mail.org

ninjin 4y ago
Last time I tried aerc (some time over a year ago), mutt had better threading and I stayed with mutt. Having read the aerc source and used it though, it comes across as a very nice modern take on a TUI MUA.
igemnace 4y ago
I use both. I mainly still keep mutt for encryption and signing. For general, day-to-day use, I prefer aerc because I grok its configuration more -- I believe one of its key advantages is its simplicity of configuration. I find it much easier to think of a keybind or string of commands to make some menial task faster. aerc still crashes on me from time to time. Not too much that I'm turned off from it, but definitely enough that I feel it's less stable than mutt. I also find it easier to work with attachments in general with mutt: picking which attachment to view and piping it into different programs.
- gnull 4y ago
  Aerc has rolled out signing and encryption support recently. I've tested signing, seems to work fine. And now it uses normal GPG keystore, not its own.
hectorhector 4y ago
Has Aerc added support for email threads yet? I tried it when it first came out and that was my biggest disappointment.
- gnull 4y ago
  Aerc can display a thread in a tree-view of a directory, yes. Run :toggle-threads to see it (I'm using Maildir backend). Using notmuch backend, one could also have a key to display all the emails that are in the same thread as the current one, so that you get a nice conversation-like view which includes sent emails as well (Purebred does this by default, for example). This is not supported out of the box yet, but I'm thinking of implementing a patch for it in the coming weeks.

teeray 4y ago

Anybody have good guides for using mutt with Gmail and Microsoft 365? The modern authentication requirements make configuring it onerous IIRC.

theophrastus 4y ago
After gmail recently greeted my mutt/IMAP request (which had worked perfectly for over a decade!) with "login failed", i've embarked upon the slow winding road to getting mutt to use OAuth2, or is it OAUTHBEARER?, for gmail. Out of a dozen or so hints spanning the last couple of years (many which depend on having python2 still around), i'd humbly promote these links to best hints: [1] http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~jacobd/posts/2022/03/configure-mutt-to-work-with-oauth-20/ http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~jacobd/posts/2022/03/configure-mut... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/backtickbot/comments/kyuq11/httpsnpredditcomrlinuxcommentskyhr5owhat_email/ https://www.reddit.com/r/backtickbot/comments/kyuq11/httpsnp... Please post any better sites you discover. It really is an overly server specific mess.
- miguelitosd 4y ago
  The other option, per a couple sites like: https://gist.github.com/bnagy/8914f712f689cc01c267 https://gist.github.com/bnagy/8914f712f689cc01c267 I set up application passwords, then configure a gmail rc file ~/.muttrc.gmail with the important bits: source "gpg -d ~/.pass/gmail-mutt.asc|" set from="ME@gmail.com" set spoolfile="imaps://imap.gmail.com/INBOX" set folder="imaps://imap.gmail.com/" set postponed="imaps://imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Drafts" and the GPG encrypted file has the following: set imap_user="ME" set imap_pass="APP_PASSWORD" set imap_idle="yes" set smtp_url="smtps://ME@gmail.com:APP_PASSWORD@smtp.gmail.com:465/' I wrapped a simple gmail command to run: mutt -F ~/.muttrc.gmail GPG pops up a password prompt, then mutt does it's thing and works just fine.

tiben_ 4y ago

I tried and used it 10 years ago in my 20's period were i discoreved the joyful of terminal world. But as of today, no.. it is not sustainable in professional world. As Vim which i used to love for years, but now i must admit IntelliJ simply does the work... mutt, for a mail tool is simply not plug and play. have no time now to deal with configuration files, proxy tools and so on to deal with such a simple thing like sending an email. Please note i'm not bashing mutt, its a great peace of code

leephillips 4y ago
“it is not sustainable in professional world” Huh? I use email for all my important communication, and Mutt is the only client that is powerful and convenient enough.
- tiben_ 4y ago
  With common email providers like gmail, live.com and so on, you have to configure IMAP proxies with is just an headache for this specific use case. Not to speak about real life use case were the email is HTML formatted with images. mutt, as far as i know is rooted to Unix local email handling. Which is not very friendly when used with common web providers 99% people use today In 2022, I love linux and command line. But mutt is outside the limit i can tolerate about this dogma.
  - leephillips 4y ago
    I think you’re mistaken. Mutt works fine with IMAP servers. It’s quite flexible. In the small minority of cases when I need to see the email in a full-blown web browser, it takes two keystrokes to open it there.
    - tiben_ 4y ago
      I know this. i've spent a lot of time years ago to configure mutt to fetch my gmail/hotmail/free accounts and it worked pretty well. But when you change computer hardware what a hassle to reconfigure everything. Such a simple thing like sending email should now be a no-brainer. i quit this dogma to use my brain for more insighful things

kristianpaul 4y ago

I've been using mutt , screen/byobu, vim/spf13, newsboat, getmail, procmail, weechat and irssi for a while now, nice text-based workspace combo.

guessbest 4y ago

Is today the day that YN posts every non-mainstream email client to distract from the collapsing tech sector? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31691783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31691783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31690699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31690699

macrolocal 4y ago
Wait-- Mutt is not mainstream?
riedel 4y ago
Still waiting for the elm 2.6 release to post it :)
krzyk 4y ago
collapsing tech sector?
em-bee 4y ago
interesting to note, slypheed was posted first, 13 hours ago. it took about 8 hours to reach 50 points and now has 69 points and 21 comments. claws was posted 3 hours later and reached 50 points 2 hours before slypheed, only about 3 hours after posting and now has 122 points and 72 comments. finally mutt was posted 5 hours ago, and reached 50 points after only about 1.5 hours and now has 134 points and 122 comments. you may draw your own conclusions.
- em-bee 4y ago
  sup was posted two hours after mutt and took about 11 hours to get 50 points
em-bee 4y ago
two more: Sup – A curses threads-with-tags style email client https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31696235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31696235 Mu4e – Emacs email client backed by Xapian https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31696199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31696199

ilovecaching 4y ago

Mutt's downfall is it's designed around a single account. Most people have at least a personal and work email account, if not more. People also access their email through IMAP these days. Mutt has many config hacks to try and make it load multiple IMAP accounts, but a single failure to auth or connect will leave mutt completely frozen. I have to use mutt to read and pull kernel patches, but I hate it. I would love a modern tui email client to rise from the ashes, but I doubt that will ever happen.

em-bee 4y ago
when i switched to sup, it was a paradigm change in terms of interfaces compared to mutt. i can't say how well it works with imap though because i don't use that feature.
WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
Not only that. It's still built around that ancient concept that users connect via TTYs to a single machine, and mail is actually moving mail locally to their /var/spool/mail/%u, no network involved. In fact, this is also what all self-hosted email guides expect in Anno Fucking Domini 2022! I don't want to have to create system users just so they can have their mailboxes! Somebody tell those guys that such defaults are not sensible in this age.
mechanicalpulse 4y ago
I use fetchmail+procmail for IMAP. I have no problem with freezing or multiple accounts.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Mutt is not single account, mutt is account-agnostic. Dump your email to one mailbox or a thousand, and it'll process those according to your configuration setting(s). It's possible to configure mutt to handle multiple accounts by: - Dumping accounts to independent mailboxes and accessing through through specific mutt configurations. - Dumping accounts to independent folders and Using folder-hook to set account-specific configurations. - Performing other configurations based on reciepient and/or sender.

dsr_ 4y ago

If you manage large amounts of email (100K+ messages in a mailbox, 1K+ messages a day), mutt is the only reasonable choice. If you miss mh/nmh and wish that it had a wrapper that could do everything and made sense, mutt is your savior. If you work with people who think that changing the colors and fonts in a message is a good way of clarifying what they are responding to, go find different people to work with. If you need to spend several minutes synthesizing a reply from a bunch of different messages all of which should be on-screen at once, (a) you have my sympathies, and (b) yes, you need a GUI mail client.

tephra 4y ago
Mutt is indeed good but as a gnus user I'd have to disagree that it is the _only_ reasonable option ;)
- dig1 4y ago
  As an emacs + notmuch [1] user, I'll agree with you :) [1] https://notmuchmail.org/ https://notmuchmail.org/
- spear 4y ago
  Yeah, I've been using Gnus for more than 25 years, although I now use mbsync to download e-mail first. Before that, I used the original GNUS for Usenet and VM for e-mail.
  - ylee 4y ago
    27 years on VM here (currently 8.2.0b), using fetchmail to download mail locally. I tried Gnus a couple of times for Usenet but never stuck with it because of Emacs's lack of multithreading. I've never tried Gnus for email because VM has always met my needs. It does an amazingly good job rendering HTML mail into something readable on a text terminal (the way I use VM and Emacs), complete with keyboard-navigable links that VM sends to an external web browser, and for the few times I need to see the actual graphics, a single keystroke sends the message's source to said browser. Personality Crisis (which is nowadays included with VM, as opposed to being separate back when you used it) automatically rewrites the From: line based on the message I'm replying to. Using BBDB, Personality Crisis also does so when creating a new message based on the recipient. Mairix handles superfast searching of my decades of mail archives. You know this of course, but I can't overstate to other people how nice being able to modify/extend VM with Elisp is. I rewrote the link-navigation code to handle all link types, and wrote the code that the abovementioned single keystroke invokes. VM isn't perfect. I know that I could do all of the above with Gnus, and quite possibly am missing out on other features that VM lacks. Overall, though, I really feel like I have a superpower for email handling with it.

em-bee 4y ago

i don't remember when i started using mutt, but i sat at a table with michael elkins at LUG meetings, and tried to be funny by saying "i didn't write mutt, it was me" i have been using mutt for more than a decade after that, until i discovered sup (supmua). for me one of mutts's big weaknesses (and that of every other commandline client) was that it could only keep one mail folder open at one time. at some point i had four instances of mutt running in parallel in multiple screen/tmux windows so that i could switch between folders without having to reopen each one. sup fixed that by allowing me to open multiple views and keeping state while switching between them. it also replaces folders with tags and an extensive search interface with saved searches that can be treated like virtual folders. i haven't looked back. sup inspired notmuch, that brings the search feature to other mail clients (including neomutt) but i don't know if neomutt also keeps state between views. i am sticking with sup because of that.

BeetleB 4y ago
I use notmuch on Emacs (yes, found it after seeing sup). For those who don't want to use Emacs, notmuch has other clients: https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/ https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/ alot was one of the early ones and last I checked (years ago) was quite featureful. For people who want something other than mutt, I strongly recommend something based on notmuch. It also comes with Python bindings so it's easy to write complex rules to filter incoming email.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  I also use notmuch and emacs. I have always preferred text email clients. The first one I used was elm, then pine, then I was using gnus for a while but treating mail as news wasn't quite right. Switched to mutt, then back to emacs w/notmuch (using w3m to render HTML emails) and that has been the best for me for a number of years.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  I use notmuch as well (with astroid as frontend), but I definitely think there are 2 big issues: 1. All clients except for the Emacs one are quite unfinished and development slowed down for quite a few of them. 2. Using it with multiple computers is not working well. I use two computers and am travelling often (so need offline access to my mail so can't just ssh into one machine). I have been using muchsync with an additional server (as the other computers are not always connected). The server syncs to the work exchange server using mbsync. That sort of works, but is brittle and sometimes things get out of sync (I had to search the the muchsync sqlite database recently to delete an entry) or break. I tried other solutions (e.g. sync the notmuch db using syncthing) but broke even more often. It gets even worse if you also use your phone for email like I do (you essentially have no search on the phone). I think it is quite obvious that notmuch was designed by developers who use a single computer and don't travel much and don't see much value in mail on multiple devices. I really wish jmap would have better adoption because a jmap server with some local cache for offline work (similar to how e.g. mutt handles IMAP) would be the best solution IMO.

user3939382 4y ago

I tried to commit to mutt but, the vast majority of emails I receive are HTML based which means you have to launch and open a new web browser window to view almost every email. This was a total PITA.

rinze 4y ago
It depends. Most HTML e-mail can be parsed within the mutt viewer using an external program that converts HTML -> text in a graceful way. That works for 99 % of the HTML e-mail (which is typically just people that send it that way because they don't know better.) For newsletters and such, you can have a shortcut that opens the HTML portion in a browser tab automatically. This is done by adding this to your ~/.mailcap: text/html; mutt_bgrun /usr/bin/firefox %s >/dev/null 2>&1; needsterminal text/html; elinks -dump ; copiousoutput (where `mutt_bgrun` is here: https://www.mattcutts.com/files/mutt_bgrun https://www.mattcutts.com/files/mutt_bgrun) And then on ~/.muttrc: macro index,pager ,b "<view-attachments>/html<enter><view-mailcap><exit>" "View first HTML attachment in browser" That way, if I'm on an e-mail and I want the actual HTML rendering, I hit ",b" and it goes to a browser tab.
- jwilk 4y ago
  If you really want to view mails in Firefox, you should do this in a dedicated profile that has JavaScript and outgoing connections disabled.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
    What’s the impact of not disabling JavaScript?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
twic 4y ago
Weird. The vast majority of emails i get (which i actually want to read) work fine in Alpine. Either they have a plain text version, or Alpine is rendering the HTML, i'm not sure which. Who is sending you these obligate HTML emails?

howeyc 4y ago

Question for terminal email users. What do you use on mobile? Do you not bother having email access on your phone? Or do you ssh into a tmux session somewhere? Or do you have a client on your phone in addition to using terminal at the desk.

rinze 4y ago
I use mutt on my desktop just because for my use case it's the best tool for the job, and have the regular Fastmail app on the phone.
stevekemp 4y ago
When I used mutt I'd SSH into my mailserver. Make would be delivered to ~/Maildir, and that's where I'd read it from. That said the host would also run dovecot and allow reading via IMAP if there was ever a need to access things remotely.
shakna 4y ago
The same thing I use on my desktop. I run a CLI on my Android. Termux had to move more exclusively to F-droid because of some Play Store changes, but I was already using F-droid so that made exactly no difference to me.
em-bee 4y ago
i deliberately don't have email on my phone, because i really don't want to deal with longer messages there. also i don't want to use the phone for work. i use it for messaging, but anything that needs a longer response i prefer to write on a real keyboard. not having email on the phone allows me to limit phone use to short quick responses. anything else can wait.
SoftTalker 4y ago
I don't read email from my phone. I am on android, and I have a gmail account for that, but I don't ever read it or use it for anything else.
sam_lowry_ 4y ago
K-9 Mail

rsync 4y ago

alpine user here. I can't imagine mouse-mousing around to deal with email. Further, in 2022, I still find myself (albeit rarely) in low-bandwidth environments where an email client suitable for a 9600 baud modem comes in handy. But perhaps most interesting: When I send email to other rsync.net employees, it never traverses the Internet. They are logged in, via ssh, to our mailserver as am I. The content of the emails transmits only as (ephemeral) characters in a terminal and the data transfer over the Internet exists only as ssh. This pleases me greatly ...

throw0101a 4y ago

How is the OAUTH support nowadays on (neo)mutt? More and more 'webmail' systems seem to mandate it.

emkemp 4y ago

From the man page on http://www.mutt.org/doc/mutt.1.txt http://www.mutt.org/doc/mutt.1.txt BUGS None. Mutts have fleas, not bugs.

a-dub 4y ago

mutt was notable for it's automatic threading support. personally i found it interesting but had an emotional attachment to pine. i suspect that the threading support in gmail was probably inspired by mutt.

qudat 4y ago

After dabbling with `aerc` I've moved to `mblaze` which has been a blast to work with. It really emphasizes the unix philosophy and allows for composition of commands. https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze I've started cataloging all the terminal mail clients in a list: https://erock.lists.sh/terminal-mail-clients https://erock.lists.sh/terminal-mail-clients Happy to add others if people know of some that I've missed.

ashton314 4y ago
Would you count mu and mu4e? https://github.com/djcb/mu https://github.com/djcb/mu
- qudat 4y ago
  Added, thanks!
  - asdfqwertzxcv 4y ago
    Also gotta add notmuch and some more of the other frontends - https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/ https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/
    - qudat 4y ago
      done!
jolmg 4y ago
Thanks for recommending mblaze. Nearly all terminal mail clients use a TUI. It's nice to see a client besides nmh that uses a CLI instead. > Happy to add others if people know of some that I've missed. Here are a couple of lists with clients you're missing: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications#Email_clients https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications#Email_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients

djdeutschebahn 4y ago

I think the authors quote on the top of the page was potential inspiration of this website https://tools.suckless.org https://tools.suckless.org and it's tools. The suckless.org url showed up multiple times in hn-search, but they did not get upvotes like this one. As I understand it's pretty low-level stuff. But I find surf (browser) quite compelling, mostly because of default no-tabs and full screen for less distraction.

mechanicalpulse 4y ago

Mutt remains my primary email client to this day. I use procmail for filtering and mu for indexing/searching.

mbreese 4y ago

Of course this has to get posted on a Friday. And so thus begins my biannual experiment of trying to convert my mail usage over to Mutt. Every so often I try to convert back to Mutt from webmail. Every time I enjoy the process, but end up switching back. Part of the friction was supporting multiple imap accounts (Google and Office365). I know it’s possible, but there was still friction. However, given the hoops I have to jump through to even get my Office 365 webmail nowadays, I’m not entirely sure a text based email client is even possible. Which is sad.

dredmorbius 4y ago
What specifically do you get hung up on? For multiple IMAP accounts, you can employ mutt's folder-hook settings. - Use an IMAP sync tool (offlineimap, imapsync, and others). Yes, mutt has its own tools for accessing accounts, IME you're better off to use a third-party tool. - Dump those accounts to independent folders, generally. There are options for integrating / sorting mail as it arrives, including procmail and mailtool. If you prefer a single integrated inbox, that's also an option. Mutt has numerous hook options to set values based on folder, which can be used to set various parameters. Alternatively, you can also set specific configuration files to apply to specific folders. Your personal, work, and anonymous email profiles are each independent in this way.

pge 4y ago

I used mutt for awhile but ultimately switched away from it because of two issues that came up a lot: * calendar invitations (google or outlook calendar). I could not find any program that could process the invitation, respond and save to my calendar, so I had to handle calendar invitations on my phone. I looked into writing something myself (the CALDAV protocol is plain text and not overly complicated) but never got around to it. * HTML emails -as others have noted, w3m is pretty good at rendering most emails but not all. The ones that it didn't render to plaintext well were annoying and required opening a browser to view them. Outside of those issues, it worked great with davmail grabbing email from an exchange server, and offlineimap saving mail locally.

dang 4y ago

Related: Mutt 2.2.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317229 - Feb 2022 (16 comments) Mutt releases version 2.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25222166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25222166 - Nov 2020 (40 comments) Mutt and Gmail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25156796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25156796 - Nov 2020 (4 comments) Mutt 2.0 Release Notes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25019901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25019901 - Nov 2020 (76 comments) Mutt email client 25 years old - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173676 - Aug 2020 (158 comments) Using Gmail with Mutt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23130859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23130859 - May 2020 (1 comment) Patch Workflow with Mutt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20694586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20694586 - Aug 2019 (1 comment) Using gmail with mutt (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16962136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16962136 - April 2018 (18 comments) Switching to the Mutt Email Client - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14567074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14567074 - June 2017 (241 comments) Using Gmail with Mutt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12563398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12563398 - Sept 2016 (53 comments) Mutt 1.7.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12324506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12324506 - Aug 2016 (90 comments) Mutt 1.6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11425642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11425642 - April 2016 (183 comments) Why Some Security Experts Use Mutt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182582 - Sept 2015 (157 comments) The Homely Mutt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4597156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4597156 - Oct 2012 (110 comments) Using Mutt with Gmail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1469915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1469915 - June 2010 (7 comments)

tpoacher 4y ago

is it possible to use these to access work email, which requires MFA to access?