18 ms·

Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt

138 points by Klasiaster 4y ago

zimpenfish 4y ago
Tried this, it sat for 12 hours on "loading..." without success even though my inbox only has 17k mails in it. Given that neomutt is working fine, it's not a huge problem but it's always nice to have options.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > my inbox only has 17k mails in it I can't tell if you're intentionally joking or are actually unaware of that being maybe a little much.
  - bugmen0t 4y ago
    It shouldn’t be. IMAP doesn’t have to download all of them.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      Oh, that's fair. I was questioning the reasonableness of having 17k emails but you're right, the software should be able to support it.
      - zimpenfish 4y ago
        Oh, it's a nonsense, definitely, but it only gets cleaned out every 6 months or thereabouts and I've not yet translated the rules in my cleaning script to Sieve rules to do it automatically.
      - seszett 4y ago
        What are you doing with your old emails? Do you delete them? Or have you found a method to archive them that produces few folders with few emails in each and that works consistently over the decades? Because I haven't, and having everything in one folder works just fine with the clients I use.
        yonrg 4y ago
        I use two folders, inbox (currently active mails, also sent ones) and trash, which is the ever growing pile of mails. Most importantly is the use of a mail indexer (notmuch currently) for searching and getting virtual mailbox viewes.
        Jorengarenar 4y ago
        I delete e-mails the moment I don't need them anymore. Right now, on my main mail, I have ~400 mails in Trash, but only 10 in Inbox and Archive + another dozen in Sent.
        seszett 4y ago
        I sometimes wish to find emails that I couldn't have known I would need again. Right now, I've been looking for the email address of the landlord of the house I lived in until 2009. I'm happy that I didn't remove his email saying that his son would come on Friday to fix the door handle.
  - Avamander 4y ago
    It really shouldn't be too much. It's not the 80s. The same letters slapped into SQLite the most brute way would work (and perform better), so why the embarrassing slowdown?
  - Ndymium 4y ago
    Is it much? I have around 120k emails in my inbox. macOS Mail.app opens it in a jiffy. Computers are supposed to be fast nowadays.
  - johnklos 4y ago
    I have 93,000 emails in my mail spool, and it opens in Pine in about 30 seconds on a 1 GHz AlphaServer, even when lots of other stuff is running at the same time.
  - jlokier 4y ago
    Hm. I just checked and my ~/Mail/inbox has 1.38 million messages. That doesn't include most mailing lists, because those are sorted into their own separate folders using procmail. I use Neomutt with Notmuch, btw. It generally loads in a fraction of a second. I used to try to keep on top of mail. I don't any more.
- epilys 4y ago
  Try using the latest commit if you're not already since the last tagged release had a lot of bugs that have been solved. Otherwise, could you file a bug in the issue tracker? https://git.meli.delivery/meli/meli/issues https://git.meli.delivery/meli/meli/issues
Klasiaster 4y ago
With (al)pine in contrast to mutt you at least have filtering rules to move a mail to a folder. I hope that this would be added to meli, too - that's the last thing I would consider missing when reading the docs on the website: https://meli.delivery/ https://meli.delivery/
- sam_lowry_ 4y ago
  Why not use procmail for it?
  - simmons 4y ago
    I'm not the grandparent poster, but I'm not sure if this is what they had in mind by "filtering rules". When I read the comment, I immediately thought of how I use procmail for live sorting of incoming mail, but I also occasionally pull out al(pine) for various manual sorting/rearranging tasks. I've always found its "broaden/narrow selection + zoom" tools to be pretty powerful. (Maybe mutt has tools of similar capability; I don't know.)
    - aduitsis 4y ago
      Not exactly the same, but in mutt, there is a simple language which you can use to refer to a subset of the messages in your view. E.g. "~U" will match you unread messages, etc. You can group tag messages on mutt with any pattern you'd like and then move them. Or, you can limit your view to what you want to move, select some and then move them.
      - epilys 4y ago
        There's functionality for that in meli (`select <query>` command) which then can be used with `moveto` command or `delete` etc... (Γεια σου Θανάση! μάνος από εμπ και meli dev)
  - sliken 4y ago
    I did that, decades ago. Sieve is a very nice upgrade, safer, easier to read/write, and even had a web UI if you want.
mxuribe 4y ago
My very first email account (when starting university in the early 90s) was via Pine on a unix machine; and i loved it! Sure, the excitement of "a new tech thing" was there, but also the fast, productive simplicity of it all: i can send a message to someone anywhere in the world quite easily! Years later when i started getting into linux as my personal machine/daily driver, i tried using mutt. Mutt didn't stick for me then. I give mutt (and other terminal clients like it) tons of respect, but for me it has been more an issue on my preference side; and nothing against mutt. And, now over the years (with linux very much my daily driver for years now), I find myself leveraging the terminal much much more - e.g. reading RSS feed via newsboat, etc....sort of a return to the basics, but basics that enable me to be far more productive. But one of the areas where i still can't seem to be comfortable in the terminal anymore is email. I think its because of attachments that i constantly need send and receive, and maybe the workflow for that is not ideal *for me* - i don't know. Or, maybe I've gotten so used to Thunderbird, that my brain seems happy there, where it has been happy in the terminak for other areas - who knows. In any case, i welcome more terminal apps! Yes, keep on improving mutt for others, but maybe this new one might work for me (and others who haven't clicked with mutt and its ilk). Kudos and good luck to the makers of Meli! (Who knows, maybe i'll give it a spin)
- jdmoreira 4y ago
  I was thinking was using pine in a unix shell account at university in 2002 and I have the fondest memories! That was an awesome client
- buildbot 4y ago
  People still use (al)pine at the University of Washington, where is was created! They even have stats on it going back a long time: https://staff.washington.edu/corey/pine-stats/ https://staff.washington.edu/corey/pine-stats/
  - rsync 4y ago
    Every email ever sent from anyone working at rsync.net is sent with (al)pine.
  - 4y ago
kleiba 4y ago
The problem is the HTML Emails I annoyingly get sent by non-tech people.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  With mutt, you can tell it to pass HTML through an external program (like a text mode browser) to render to plain text. Not immediately obvious if meli supports that, but it is at least tractable.
  - aduitsis 4y ago
    Elinks for rendering html mail and antiword for rendering word documents inside the mutt message view.
  - epilys 4y ago
    meli does pass html messages to w3m by default, but you can change it to anything else with the `html_filter` setting.
- zhxshen 4y ago
  I use aerc, which is similar to this, but written in Go. Most of these TUI mail clients have a configurable filter option for different MIME types. I've found that this program does a great job as an HTML to text filter: https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text I think the classic approach is to use something like lynx or w3m with networking disabled, but I wasn't impressed with the output.
- layer8 4y ago
  In Mutt I auto-view those with w3m. The main limitation is that you can’t reply while preserving the HTML (at least I know of no TUI HTML mail editor).
lwhsiao 4y ago
Love the recent efforts on building new terminal clients. I'm excited to try meli out. I've been using https://aerc-mail.org/ https://aerc-mail.org/ as a daily driver for several months, but excited to try some others in this space. I found mutt a bit intimidating to configure, where aerc and meli seem more straightforward.
- nix23 4y ago
  Eh wow thanks for then tip (aerc) beeing a user of neomutt i definetly will try that one out.
- noloblo 4y ago
  how to install aerc thanks
  - endperform 4y ago
    From the release tarball: ## Installation ### Binary Packages Recent versions of aerc are available on: - [Alpine] - [Arch] - [Debian] - [Fedora] - [macOS through Homebrew] And likely other platforms. ### From Source Install the dependencies: - go (>=1.16) (Go versions are supported until their end-of-life; support for older versions may be dropped at any time due to incompatibilities or newer required language features.) - [scdoc](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc) Then compile aerc: $ make
- gurjeet 4y ago
  Thanks for recommending aerc. I gave it a try for my Postgres contributions workflow, and it was very easy to use it. Having tried mutt, it was surprisingly easy to configure aerc to work with GMail. I am able to induce a crash pretty reliably (by pressing J or K at a fast rate), and probably there are other minor bugs hidden. But aerc is good enough to be my daily driver for my workflow.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
If this is "in the spirit of mutt", how is it different?
- epilys 4y ago
  It has context of mailboxes, accounts, doesn't require you to do "tricks" to setup mailbox switching etc.
mhd 4y ago
Hmm, how does this look on a regular 80x25 terminal?
jarbus 4y ago
Does anyone know the status of gitea federation yet? This is the first repo I've seen in the wild that uses it But my god this client is beautiful
- tandav 4y ago
  > And since I get asked this a ton, these federated features like federated following are (obviously) not in Gitea right now, but will probably be released in Gitea 1.18 in October. According to this blog post https://a.exozy.me/posts/gitea-actually-joins-the-fediverse/ https://a.exozy.me/posts/gitea-actually-joins-the-fediverse/
jbaber 4y ago
Any hints at where the name comes from? It means "woman" in Toki Pona.
- epilys 4y ago
  From the manpage meli(1) : > NAME > Meli Mail User Agent. meli is the Greek word for honey https://meli.delivery/documentation.html#meli.1 https://meli.delivery/documentation.html#meli.1
chazeon 4y ago
I hope I can use this kind of client one day. The only thing stopping me is my bad English, which results in my reliance on Grammarly etc.
- femiagbabiaka 4y ago
  https://github.com/emacs-grammarly https://github.com/emacs-grammarly try this
conaclos 4y ago
I could welcome any comparison with aerc (https://aerc-mail.org https://aerc-mail.org).
- BeetleB 4y ago
  Does aerc support notmuch?
  - falsifian 4y ago
    Yes, I'm using it with notmuch, and it works reasonably well. A couple of caveats: - If you want to save outgoing mail, you need to include your own mail-sending script (mine is below). This is because aerc treats the notmuch backend as read-only. - For the same reason, you can't postpone messages with the notmuch backend. - I find it a little annoying jumping between search queries. Basically, I have to type out the new query each time. The aerc notmuch backend treats notmuch queries like folders, but it instantly forgets the previous "folder" existed when you go to a new one. It probably wouldn't be too hard to fix these; if I stick with aerc I'll probably try eventually. My mail-sending script; tested only on OpenBSD: #!/bin/sh # # Save a copy of an email in Sent, then send it with sendmail. set -e TMP=$(mktemp -d) cat > "$TMP/message" notmuch insert --folder=Sent < "$TMP/message" sendmail -f falsifian@falsifian.org "$@" < "$TMP/message" rm -r -- "$TMP"
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
natnatenathan 4y ago
I am also nostalgic for Pine, but what I think I really miss is the email from 1998, text only messages from my friends and professors.
- mxuribe 4y ago
  Nostal;gia for sure! But, there's also something to what you noted about "text only messages"...it feels like folks on email used to be far more - i dont know if this is the right word, but - efficient in trying to get to their point (without depoending on imagery too much). And, i'm not talkiing about usimng shorthand (like BTW, BRB, etc.)...No, i feel like folks knew how to actually craft a short but effective message (for the most part), and emoji were mostly decorative and not part of the core message....but maybe i'm just a grumpy guy remembering thisngs with rose-tinted memories. :-)
rodolphoarruda 4y ago
I like the compact mode. It looks sleek.
elif 4y ago
love the name
bennyp101 4y ago
I gotta ask, how do people use this in the real world? How do attachments and images work? Does it work with O365? Can I sync my calendars? Why not just use thunderbird or something? Genuinely curious
- jrm4 4y ago
  Neomutt user here. Attachments are downloaded with a few keystrokes, I also have a command to "open in browser" if I really really need to see the images which is rare. I do use mine with Outlook Mail, but it just does mail. I'll bet there's probably a calendar sync thing. And the why is speed, overwhelmingly. I don't delete any email and I don't have to use spam filters because it's THAT FAST. I can "move" literally as quickly as it takes to identify the message and decide what to do with it (read, not-read and skip, respond etc) I just archive EVERYTHING that's read, and make a separate note in my todos if there's something I need to act on that isn't a reply. Replying to humans is very quick too, which is really the only thing I need from email.
- epilys 4y ago
  Attachments: you can open them with any command or save them as a file. For example on linux, you can open a file with `xdg-open` and it will try to select the default app from the mime type. Images: you can select to view HTML emails on the browser (default is plain text generated by w3m) but it should be possible to use some other script instead of w3m that shows images in your terminal. No calendar support, it's just email (well, and NNTP) WHy not use thunderbird? Hm it's personal taste. Since I'm on the terminal most of the time, I find it more convenient. But obviously Thunderbird is the best GUI client since it's most mature, stable and it's open source.
Emigre_ 4y ago
I’d like a terminal email client inspired by vim’s usual keys and behaviour. I didn’t particularly like mutt’s default keys.
- epilys 4y ago
  meli has somewhat vim-like default key bindings. But every shortcut can be re-defined to your own preference. Check out meli.conf(5) manual page!
  - Emigre_ 4y ago
    Good to know, thanks.
zbuf 4y ago
I get excited when I hear of something like this, but then it often turns to indifference when "terminal" UI is shoe-horning GUI elements into large grids of UTF8. There's a time and place for GUI if that is the motivation, and for anything short of that my Pine/Alpine familiarity is going to be hard to beat. But what would be interesting is "command-line" for a modern email client. Similar in spirit to the old mh, perhaps. Concise commands for viewing folders, threads, searching, composing etc. Which integrate well with grep, xargs etc. for bulk operations. Rather than IMAP support, the heavy lifting of sync'ing Maildir folders could be done by dovecot, with searches by mairix.
- rakoo 4y ago
  You're probably looking for notmuch, which integrates very well with other tools. There's also mblaze (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze) that might be of interest.
  - zbuf 4y ago
    I heard of notmuch, but I remember I dismissed it for whatever reason. Perhaps as it's a text UI, rather than command line. However, mblaze looks very promising. Thanks for that. It's almost literally what I had in my minds eye. It's light on dependencies and also packaged for Alpine Linux which is a good sign, and means I'm already trying it! :)
    - eduction 4y ago
      Notmuch is fully command line, there are any number of traditional cli commands, it’s a suite ala git but not a tui or anything: https://notmuchmail.org/doc/latest/ https://notmuchmail.org/doc/latest/ See for example notmuch-search and notmuch-tag. Maybe you are thinking of notmuch-emacs or some other full blown client. There are many https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/ https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/ Notmuch’s core is largely in C and I believe the only serious dependency is Xapian.
      - 4y ago
gbourant 4y ago
meli means honey in Greek
markdown 4y ago
Meli is the Fijian word for mail. Source: self, Fijian.
- epilys 4y ago
  Super interesting! I chose meli as a name because it sounds like mail, kinda. Do you know if the Fiji word is a loanword from european languages? (old french/german)
  - markdown 4y ago
    Yes, it's an anglicism (english loanword). For example, a mail ship would be called meli sitima (mail steamer). The postal service is also called meli. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Mail_Ship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Mail_Ship

138 points by Klasiaster 4y ago

Tried this, it sat for 12 hours on "loading..." without success even though my inbox only has 17k mails in it. Given that neomutt is working fine, it's not a huge problem but it's always nice to have options.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> my inbox only has 17k mails in it I can't tell if you're intentionally joking or are actually unaware of that being maybe a little much.
- bugmen0t 4y ago
  It shouldn’t be. IMAP doesn’t have to download all of them.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    Oh, that's fair. I was questioning the reasonableness of having 17k emails but you're right, the software should be able to support it.
    - zimpenfish 4y ago
      Oh, it's a nonsense, definitely, but it only gets cleaned out every 6 months or thereabouts and I've not yet translated the rules in my cleaning script to Sieve rules to do it automatically.
    - seszett 4y ago
      What are you doing with your old emails? Do you delete them? Or have you found a method to archive them that produces few folders with few emails in each and that works consistently over the decades? Because I haven't, and having everything in one folder works just fine with the clients I use.
      - yonrg 4y ago
        I use two folders, inbox (currently active mails, also sent ones) and trash, which is the ever growing pile of mails. Most importantly is the use of a mail indexer (notmuch currently) for searching and getting virtual mailbox viewes.
      - Jorengarenar 4y ago
        I delete e-mails the moment I don't need them anymore. Right now, on my main mail, I have ~400 mails in Trash, but only 10 in Inbox and Archive + another dozen in Sent.
        seszett 4y ago
        I sometimes wish to find emails that I couldn't have known I would need again. Right now, I've been looking for the email address of the landlord of the house I lived in until 2009. I'm happy that I didn't remove his email saying that his son would come on Friday to fix the door handle.
- Avamander 4y ago
  It really shouldn't be too much. It's not the 80s. The same letters slapped into SQLite the most brute way would work (and perform better), so why the embarrassing slowdown?
- Ndymium 4y ago
  Is it much? I have around 120k emails in my inbox. macOS Mail.app opens it in a jiffy. Computers are supposed to be fast nowadays.
- johnklos 4y ago
  I have 93,000 emails in my mail spool, and it opens in Pine in about 30 seconds on a 1 GHz AlphaServer, even when lots of other stuff is running at the same time.
- jlokier 4y ago
  Hm. I just checked and my ~/Mail/inbox has 1.38 million messages. That doesn't include most mailing lists, because those are sorted into their own separate folders using procmail. I use Neomutt with Notmuch, btw. It generally loads in a fraction of a second. I used to try to keep on top of mail. I don't any more.
epilys 4y ago
Try using the latest commit if you're not already since the last tagged release had a lot of bugs that have been solved. Otherwise, could you file a bug in the issue tracker? https://git.meli.delivery/meli/meli/issues https://git.meli.delivery/meli/meli/issues

Klasiaster 4y ago

With (al)pine in contrast to mutt you at least have filtering rules to move a mail to a folder. I hope that this would be added to meli, too - that's the last thing I would consider missing when reading the docs on the website: https://meli.delivery/ https://meli.delivery/

sam_lowry_ 4y ago
Why not use procmail for it?
- simmons 4y ago
  I'm not the grandparent poster, but I'm not sure if this is what they had in mind by "filtering rules". When I read the comment, I immediately thought of how I use procmail for live sorting of incoming mail, but I also occasionally pull out al(pine) for various manual sorting/rearranging tasks. I've always found its "broaden/narrow selection + zoom" tools to be pretty powerful. (Maybe mutt has tools of similar capability; I don't know.)
  - aduitsis 4y ago
    Not exactly the same, but in mutt, there is a simple language which you can use to refer to a subset of the messages in your view. E.g. "~U" will match you unread messages, etc. You can group tag messages on mutt with any pattern you'd like and then move them. Or, you can limit your view to what you want to move, select some and then move them.
    - epilys 4y ago
      There's functionality for that in meli (`select <query>` command) which then can be used with `moveto` command or `delete` etc... (Γεια σου Θανάση! μάνος από εμπ και meli dev)
- sliken 4y ago
  I did that, decades ago. Sieve is a very nice upgrade, safer, easier to read/write, and even had a web UI if you want.

mxuribe 4y ago

My very first email account (when starting university in the early 90s) was via Pine on a unix machine; and i loved it! Sure, the excitement of "a new tech thing" was there, but also the fast, productive simplicity of it all: i can send a message to someone anywhere in the world quite easily! Years later when i started getting into linux as my personal machine/daily driver, i tried using mutt. Mutt didn't stick for me then. I give mutt (and other terminal clients like it) tons of respect, but for me it has been more an issue on my preference side; and nothing against mutt. And, now over the years (with linux very much my daily driver for years now), I find myself leveraging the terminal much much more - e.g. reading RSS feed via newsboat, etc....sort of a return to the basics, but basics that enable me to be far more productive. But one of the areas where i still can't seem to be comfortable in the terminal anymore is email. I think its because of attachments that i constantly need send and receive, and maybe the workflow for that is not ideal *for me* - i don't know. Or, maybe I've gotten so used to Thunderbird, that my brain seems happy there, where it has been happy in the terminak for other areas - who knows. In any case, i welcome more terminal apps! Yes, keep on improving mutt for others, but maybe this new one might work for me (and others who haven't clicked with mutt and its ilk). Kudos and good luck to the makers of Meli! (Who knows, maybe i'll give it a spin)

jdmoreira 4y ago
I was thinking was using pine in a unix shell account at university in 2002 and I have the fondest memories! That was an awesome client
buildbot 4y ago
People still use (al)pine at the University of Washington, where is was created! They even have stats on it going back a long time: https://staff.washington.edu/corey/pine-stats/ https://staff.washington.edu/corey/pine-stats/
- rsync 4y ago
  Every email ever sent from anyone working at rsync.net is sent with (al)pine.
- 4y ago

kleiba 4y ago

The problem is the HTML Emails I annoyingly get sent by non-tech people.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
With mutt, you can tell it to pass HTML through an external program (like a text mode browser) to render to plain text. Not immediately obvious if meli supports that, but it is at least tractable.
- aduitsis 4y ago
  Elinks for rendering html mail and antiword for rendering word documents inside the mutt message view.
- epilys 4y ago
  meli does pass html messages to w3m by default, but you can change it to anything else with the `html_filter` setting.
zhxshen 4y ago
I use aerc, which is similar to this, but written in Go. Most of these TUI mail clients have a configurable filter option for different MIME types. I've found that this program does a great job as an HTML to text filter: https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text I think the classic approach is to use something like lynx or w3m with networking disabled, but I wasn't impressed with the output.
layer8 4y ago
In Mutt I auto-view those with w3m. The main limitation is that you can’t reply while preserving the HTML (at least I know of no TUI HTML mail editor).

lwhsiao 4y ago

Love the recent efforts on building new terminal clients. I'm excited to try meli out. I've been using https://aerc-mail.org/ https://aerc-mail.org/ as a daily driver for several months, but excited to try some others in this space. I found mutt a bit intimidating to configure, where aerc and meli seem more straightforward.

nix23 4y ago
Eh wow thanks for then tip (aerc) beeing a user of neomutt i definetly will try that one out.
noloblo 4y ago
how to install aerc thanks
- endperform 4y ago
  From the release tarball: ## Installation ### Binary Packages Recent versions of aerc are available on: - [Alpine] - [Arch] - [Debian] - [Fedora] - [macOS through Homebrew] And likely other platforms. ### From Source Install the dependencies: - go (>=1.16) (Go versions are supported until their end-of-life; support for older versions may be dropped at any time due to incompatibilities or newer required language features.) - [scdoc](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc) Then compile aerc: $ make
gurjeet 4y ago
Thanks for recommending aerc. I gave it a try for my Postgres contributions workflow, and it was very easy to use it. Having tried mutt, it was surprisingly easy to configure aerc to work with GMail. I am able to induce a crash pretty reliably (by pressing J or K at a fast rate), and probably there are other minor bugs hidden. But aerc is good enough to be my daily driver for my workflow.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

If this is "in the spirit of mutt", how is it different?

epilys 4y ago
It has context of mailboxes, accounts, doesn't require you to do "tricks" to setup mailbox switching etc.

mhd 4y ago

Hmm, how does this look on a regular 80x25 terminal?

jarbus 4y ago

Does anyone know the status of gitea federation yet? This is the first repo I've seen in the wild that uses it But my god this client is beautiful

tandav 4y ago
> And since I get asked this a ton, these federated features like federated following are (obviously) not in Gitea right now, but will probably be released in Gitea 1.18 in October. According to this blog post https://a.exozy.me/posts/gitea-actually-joins-the-fediverse/ https://a.exozy.me/posts/gitea-actually-joins-the-fediverse/

jbaber 4y ago

Any hints at where the name comes from? It means "woman" in Toki Pona.

epilys 4y ago
From the manpage meli(1) : > NAME > Meli Mail User Agent. meli is the Greek word for honey https://meli.delivery/documentation.html#meli.1 https://meli.delivery/documentation.html#meli.1

chazeon 4y ago

I hope I can use this kind of client one day. The only thing stopping me is my bad English, which results in my reliance on Grammarly etc.

femiagbabiaka 4y ago
https://github.com/emacs-grammarly https://github.com/emacs-grammarly try this

conaclos 4y ago

I could welcome any comparison with aerc (https://aerc-mail.org https://aerc-mail.org).

BeetleB 4y ago
Does aerc support notmuch?
- falsifian 4y ago
  Yes, I'm using it with notmuch, and it works reasonably well. A couple of caveats: - If you want to save outgoing mail, you need to include your own mail-sending script (mine is below). This is because aerc treats the notmuch backend as read-only. - For the same reason, you can't postpone messages with the notmuch backend. - I find it a little annoying jumping between search queries. Basically, I have to type out the new query each time. The aerc notmuch backend treats notmuch queries like folders, but it instantly forgets the previous "folder" existed when you go to a new one. It probably wouldn't be too hard to fix these; if I stick with aerc I'll probably try eventually. My mail-sending script; tested only on OpenBSD: #!/bin/sh # # Save a copy of an email in Sent, then send it with sendmail. set -e TMP=$(mktemp -d) cat > "$TMP/message" notmuch insert --folder=Sent < "$TMP/message" sendmail -f falsifian@falsifian.org "$@" < "$TMP/message" rm -r -- "$TMP"

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

natnatenathan 4y ago

I am also nostalgic for Pine, but what I think I really miss is the email from 1998, text only messages from my friends and professors.

mxuribe 4y ago
Nostal;gia for sure! But, there's also something to what you noted about "text only messages"...it feels like folks on email used to be far more - i dont know if this is the right word, but - efficient in trying to get to their point (without depoending on imagery too much). And, i'm not talkiing about usimng shorthand (like BTW, BRB, etc.)...No, i feel like folks knew how to actually craft a short but effective message (for the most part), and emoji were mostly decorative and not part of the core message....but maybe i'm just a grumpy guy remembering thisngs with rose-tinted memories. :-)

rodolphoarruda 4y ago

I like the compact mode. It looks sleek.

elif 4y ago

love the name

bennyp101 4y ago

I gotta ask, how do people use this in the real world? How do attachments and images work? Does it work with O365? Can I sync my calendars? Why not just use thunderbird or something? Genuinely curious

jrm4 4y ago
Neomutt user here. Attachments are downloaded with a few keystrokes, I also have a command to "open in browser" if I really really need to see the images which is rare. I do use mine with Outlook Mail, but it just does mail. I'll bet there's probably a calendar sync thing. And the why is speed, overwhelmingly. I don't delete any email and I don't have to use spam filters because it's THAT FAST. I can "move" literally as quickly as it takes to identify the message and decide what to do with it (read, not-read and skip, respond etc) I just archive EVERYTHING that's read, and make a separate note in my todos if there's something I need to act on that isn't a reply. Replying to humans is very quick too, which is really the only thing I need from email.
epilys 4y ago
Attachments: you can open them with any command or save them as a file. For example on linux, you can open a file with `xdg-open` and it will try to select the default app from the mime type. Images: you can select to view HTML emails on the browser (default is plain text generated by w3m) but it should be possible to use some other script instead of w3m that shows images in your terminal. No calendar support, it's just email (well, and NNTP) WHy not use thunderbird? Hm it's personal taste. Since I'm on the terminal most of the time, I find it more convenient. But obviously Thunderbird is the best GUI client since it's most mature, stable and it's open source.

Emigre_ 4y ago

I’d like a terminal email client inspired by vim’s usual keys and behaviour. I didn’t particularly like mutt’s default keys.

epilys 4y ago
meli has somewhat vim-like default key bindings. But every shortcut can be re-defined to your own preference. Check out meli.conf(5) manual page!
- Emigre_ 4y ago
  Good to know, thanks.

zbuf 4y ago

I get excited when I hear of something like this, but then it often turns to indifference when "terminal" UI is shoe-horning GUI elements into large grids of UTF8. There's a time and place for GUI if that is the motivation, and for anything short of that my Pine/Alpine familiarity is going to be hard to beat. But what would be interesting is "command-line" for a modern email client. Similar in spirit to the old mh, perhaps. Concise commands for viewing folders, threads, searching, composing etc. Which integrate well with grep, xargs etc. for bulk operations. Rather than IMAP support, the heavy lifting of sync'ing Maildir folders could be done by dovecot, with searches by mairix.

rakoo 4y ago
You're probably looking for notmuch, which integrates very well with other tools. There's also mblaze (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze) that might be of interest.
- zbuf 4y ago
  I heard of notmuch, but I remember I dismissed it for whatever reason. Perhaps as it's a text UI, rather than command line. However, mblaze looks very promising. Thanks for that. It's almost literally what I had in my minds eye. It's light on dependencies and also packaged for Alpine Linux which is a good sign, and means I'm already trying it! :)
  - eduction 4y ago
    Notmuch is fully command line, there are any number of traditional cli commands, it’s a suite ala git but not a tui or anything: https://notmuchmail.org/doc/latest/ https://notmuchmail.org/doc/latest/ See for example notmuch-search and notmuch-tag. Maybe you are thinking of notmuch-emacs or some other full blown client. There are many https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/ https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/ Notmuch’s core is largely in C and I believe the only serious dependency is Xapian.
    - 4y ago

gbourant 4y ago

meli means honey in Greek

markdown 4y ago

Meli is the Fijian word for mail. Source: self, Fijian.

epilys 4y ago
Super interesting! I chose meli as a name because it sounds like mail, kinda. Do you know if the Fiji word is a loanword from european languages? (old french/german)
- markdown 4y ago
  Yes, it's an anglicism (english loanword). For example, a mail ship would be called meli sitima (mail steamer). The postal service is also called meli. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Mail_Ship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Mail_Ship