Tried notmuch a while back, ended up going back to mutt. If you're an emacs user the notmuch mode may work well for you. The notmuch.vim plugin, OTOH, leaves a lot to be desired.
More promising is this fork of mutt that adds notmuch support:
"Notmuch is not much of an email program. It doesn't receive messages (no POP or IMAP support). It doesn't send messages (no mail composer, no network code at all)."
notmuch doesn't replace mutt, you use it with mutt/offlineimap etc as your mail indexer, which makes massive mail archives instantly searchable.. (and does this extremely well)
I suspect this what the grandparent was referring to, it's not intended as a mutt replacement, so to complain that it doesn't replace it well is a bit unfair
I can't speak about notmuch (haven't tried it), but maildir-utils/mu[1] compares well to mairix. In particular, I think it's under more active development currently.
Here's my setup for that, in case anyone is interested: https://gist.github.com/45e318c68eb5a52e1646. It's essentially a cronjob (LaunchAgent on OSX) that calls a shell script to update the index periodically, plus a few macros to make searching from within mutt easier. To use this, you'll need to create a "Search" folder for maildir-utils to store results in.
I doubt I have the need to customize GMail to justify doing this amount of work...but this was a very well put-together guide that goes beyond just "how-to-replace-Sparrow" to showing the underpinnings of how e-mail works and the thought process behind a hacked-together interface and service. I'm bookmarking this as an example of a thoroughly useful and informative guide. Thanks for making this.
The weekend has just passed and you submit this on a Monday? Really? Now I'm going to wake up tomorrow, heavy with sleep after spending the wee hours tweaking my configuration and trying out "contacts", "offlineemap", and the sidebar patch (that I thought I didn't want).
Thank goodness I already have mutt installed and configured (almost) to my liking.
if you want to use your CardDAV address book with mutt, you might want to try out pycarddav http://lostpackets.de/pycarddav/ . If you want features like write support, try the write_support branch from github https://github.com/geier/pycarddav/ (you can not really edit vCards just yet, but you can add email address directly from mutt)
Do you (or anyone else reading this for that matter) have any insight on how gmail -> imap works with labels when a single message has multiple labels? For example an email may be tagged with "clients" "$JOBNAME" and "receipt". Does it put multiple copies of the message in the local cache, or does it do a hard link, or ...?
Gmail's IMAP is unfortunately broken; they implement labels as folders, not tags. This means that the same message in "All Mail", "Inbox", and "Notifications" are three different messages that happen to have the exact same content and almost identical headers/metadata.
So, by default, you're going to be storing multiple copies of each message. It's not a difficult task to use hardlinks instead if you want, but mutt can't make this judgement by itself, because not all of the metadata is identical, and mutt is designed for the general case, not specifically for Gmail.
Note that this is a Gmail issue, not strictly a mutt issue; other IMAP providers don't all have this awkward behavior.
Its user-interface is a bit mutt-influenced, but it's fully query-based and very fast, and of course you can extend it using elisp. A fairly young project, but it's near-fully documented, and the manual has instructions on how to set things up with Gmail.
I'm going to dive in here and give a huge thumbs up to mu4e. I spent a chunk of time with Gnus and Wanderlust and both feel so much slower. I can't make the switch yet because I'm too lazy to research how to get the multiple mailbox/index configuration I have with mutt (if it's possible?) but hopefully will soon.
There can be only one database (index) per mu4e/emacs instance, but you can store multiple maildirs in one database though, and there's support for multiple accounts (esp. in the upcoming 0.99; there are some recent ML-threads about this).
(i also use procmail, with procmail-lib, to filter into monthly mailboxes, and the wonderful mairix http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/ to provide fast search. in fact, for me, mairix is the most important part of all this if you want useful, fast email - but i haven't used notmuch so can't compare)
Rather than using your gmail password with offlinemap, albeit protected by keychain, I suggest creating an application specific password for offlinemap. See
http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=1858.... This is actually required if you switch to two factor authentication and still want various apps to access your google data.
Steve, I was just looking at Mutt this weekend. Thank you so much for this blog post. It will give me the push to just go and do it. Learn in the process too. How can one say no to that?
I have spent hours and hours configuring my `mutt`, `offlineimap`, `putmail.py`, but I have since grown disenchanted. In my experience, `offlineimap` is annoyingly prone to crashing without any indication. Thus, checking mail within `mutt` becomes unreliable. However, my favorite aspect of `mutt` has been and remains being able to send e-mails very quickly and easily through Terminal.
Worse than that, offlineimap can be plain destructive in the right circumstances. I've had it arbitrarily delete thousands of messages due to the local cache being in a strange state.
You might try a similar program, mbsync (http://isync.sourceforge.net/). It's worked well for me during the past half-dozen years.
mbsync does not watch or poll for changes, but you can run mbsync in a loop from your shell. Or, if you are running Linux on the mail server and client and use Maildirs, you can run mbsync from mswatch (http://mswatch.sourceforge.net/). (Disclaimer: I'm the author of mswatch.)
If you don't like offlineimap, why not run a true imap server instead? At home I have set up Dovecot + Postfix. I pull in all my remote mail through fetchmail and dump it into my own imap server. Works like a charm and it's not hard to set up.
I use Thunderbird + Muttator for reading from my laptop and mutt through SSH when reading from e.g. work. I can even read it from my Android phone and tablet.
This is a great post about a very finely tuned Mutt setup. I always enjoy reading about high customized environments. I am someone who would love to use Mutt but I get so much HTML only email it's sadly impossible for me to do so. (Newsletters and misc friends who think large HTML footers are cool.)
As when Knuth stopped releasing new versions of TeX because it reached a point where it was "done", software that has been around for long enough can eventually mature to the point where there's nothing left to add without expanding the scope of the project beyond its original definition.
Mutt may simply be at that point. I use Mutt as my primary MUA in a very similar manner to the author of the article, and I can't really say that there are any features that I want that it lacks. Of course, I can't speak for everyone on that point; for instance, some people actually want to send and receive HTML email, and Mutt can't easily deal with that. But for some of us, lack of HTML support is itself a feature, and when you really have to, piping a text/html MIME part to a browser for rendering is really easy to accomplish.
I know essentially nothing about Sparrow, but I suspect that it is a much newer product than Mutt, has had far less time to mature, and as such simply requires a more frequent release schedule than a project with Mutt's long history.
Basically, a comparison between most recent release dates doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means.
I knew if I made this joke I'd get a wall of text explaining why I was wrong; thanks, HN — you delivered!
On a more serious note, I use Sparrow every day. About the only quibble I have with it is some of the icons aren't retina versions (hardly a dealbreaker). Otherwise I'd say it meets my needs very well; doesn't that also make it ‘done’, rather than ‘effectively dead’?
Mutt has plenty of unfixed bugs, just look at the bug tracker and distro-specific patches (in Debian for instance). It is a wonderful piece of software, I use it daily, but its development definitely miss momentum.
Nowadays I use 'Sup, but I might go (back) to Alpine, because its best feature - the indexer - is also its major drawback, since it hits the disk pretty heavily, which my VPS providers don't care for.
Sparrow is still getting small updates on both iOS and OS X. Mutt hasn't been updated in a few years. I'm not sure one is more dead than the other.
Also, one app became loved because it has a really innovative UI and the other is an app that eschews a modern UI. I'm not sure many people will logically make the leap from Sparrow to Mutt. More likely, people will gravitate back to to gmail.com, which should be getting a lot of improvements from the Sparrow team in the future.
"Mutt certainly isn’t the prettiest email client around, and its setup/configuration process is one of the ugliest out there. But once you get it set up it’s got a lot of advantages over many other email clients."
Stopped reading, right there. Why are we still fighting with things that are difficult/ugly to setup/configure? Could have been the best tool ever written, but if I have to spend a half a day figuring it out, and there are other tools that do it better, I'm out.
Valid point and I fall into this camp for all sorts of key software (e.g. you'd never catch me spending more than 5 mins tweaking a new web browser).
For other software, e.g. my editor, my mail client - software i'm producing content in, rather than consuming, i'll happily put in a few hours up front to get comfortable on the grounds that i will reap a greater reward in time saved medium term.
If I could have seen that there would have been some value outside of what I currently use, I'd totally look into it. I too am more likely to spend some time messing around with editors, IDEs and other tools than I am email clients though.
"We" (meaning not you, apparently) are still doing that kind of thing because we know we'll spend thousands of days using the tool, so a few hours spend leaning it seems like a bargain. I could just as easily ask why "we" (meaning you) are still getting confused between "discoverability" and "usability" after decades of silly arguments like this.
Don't use mutt, that's fine. But come up with some better justifications. (edit for full disclosure: I don't use mutt either, having to deal professionally with enough unreadable-in-plain-text mail that it makes more sense for me to do everything in Thunderbird.)
I put time in when I feel like the tool may solve an issue or problem I have and when I think there will be a ROI for the time I spend doing it.
This seems like a pretty reasonable justification to me. Having spent a lot of time authoring emails in different tools, I'm comfortable with what I have. If what I have does what I want and the other tool that people are telling me is better has a disclaimer like the above, then what exactly am I doing wrong?
I'm all for trying out new tools and I spend hours doing so every week. I have to pick and choose what it is that I utilize. I wasn't arguing that the tool might not be valuable for some folks, just that it did a very good job of un-selling me, very quickly.
This is my fault for not explaining why I wasn't going to look into it more. According to the features it has listed, it offers me no obvious advantages to my current tools and claims to be difficult to setup and configure.
Beyond that, if you truly want adoption for a tool, you'd invest time into making sure that you remove the obstacles of someone utilizing it. This is a tool that hasn't had any major releases since "September 15, 2010" and hasn't had any commits for two months.
As silly as it sounds I think most of these tools are just being overly appreciated by a group who (at least sub-consciously) think of themselves as cool/badass for having some hacker-style terminal in front of them, you know it's true.
Hit me all you want, but the same applies to Vim and Emacs for a large percentage of people who admire these tools.
People religiously defend them just because they are 20 something year old terminal GNU/Unixy programs.
If someone came up with Vim today, with a slick polished GUI interface, etc... you'd find far less people talking about how great it is and you'd find the same people who are appreciating them today, making fun of it.
I know that's a generalisation and doesn't involve everyone but I think it is not insignificant.
There are a minority who use and need the tool and appreciate it for what it is and have been long time users. For every 1 of those people, there are thousands more who simply follow the teachings of the cult to be in the cool nerds club.
There seems to be a pattern here, a recipe for a shitty (once useful) program that is no longer relevant that a group just doesn't want to let it go.
It kinda goes like this,
1. Be a 20-something year old program written by some GNU/Unix kernel/hardcore/early developer
2. Run in terminal with a million options and parameters
3. Be extensible with all sorts of weird text file configs, plugins etc...
4. Have a short weird-sounding name that is an abbreviation of some other weird phrase
That's all you need. Then no matter how terrible the user experience is and how outdated and irrelevant your program has become, you'll always have that cult who religiously love your program and insist on extending it so it can be a space shuttle as well as a text editor and an email client.
I should point out I'm not mocking any application in particular and I think many of these tools were fantastic for their times and some of them are still quite good today but my rant is towards this obsessive religious overly-appreciative culture of praising these softwares.
We are past that age of black screens and terminals and horrible user experiences. They were fine for their times but not anymore.
I'm not gonna put up with an application that is almost as old as myself and spend hours to configure it just to be a little more efficient.
The efficiency argument seems more like an excuse, because you don't want to admit that you are putting up with the downsides of the application because of all other nerd-culture reasons.
Or, perhaps, the tools do something well, are flexible in their approach, and, by way of incremental improvements and configurations over time, fit very hand-in-glove with those who've been using them for some time.
I'd used multiple email programs before finding my way to mutt, including various GUI programs. I'd used elm and pine briefly and somewhat enjoyed them. My primary mailer prior to mutt was Netscape's built-in mail client (NN3/4). The main problems with that were instability and some lack of flexibility.
Mutt took a week or so of getting used to ... and then ... just worked.
Not having an integrated editor (e.g.: making use of vim) was a huge win. One of the huge benefits of console-mode tools is that they can make use of one another in this way.
I've used a great many email clients since encountering mutt, and none are as fast, effective, reliable, and efficient as mutt. I keep coming back.
My complaints? Search through large volumes of mail (10s to 100s of thousands of messages) is slow. Google's use of tags is really useful, and more flexible than a highly-structured set of mailboxes. There are add-ons / forks of mutt which provide both features.
There's also a lot to be said for tools which work over a minimal configuration -- 24x80 vt100 emulation over serial line (your "last ditch" remote access method for most servers), SSH, Connectbot, console, etc.
Knock them all you want. The tools are useful, ubiquitous, standard, and effective.
Something difficult to set up and/or configure can still be worth the suffering. Sure, it'd be great if it was easy to configure to boot, but sometimes pain now can reap greater payback down the line...
This may be stretching the applicable domain a bit, but I think the concept of YAGNI applies to the time/effort spent on configuring primitive tools to suit use cases that -may- present themselves in the future.
Yet I've tried at least twice in the past to fix the sidebar patch, with 0 response from the maintainer. I'm not really interested in trying to push my fixes to each distribution that is using the sidebar patch.
E.g. try various combinations of "help = yes/no" and "status_on_top = yes/no" with the sidebar enabled. It's obvious that someone wrote it just to fit their configuration.
One advantage: you can configure mutt to behave just like vim (as far as shortcut keys go).
If you don't use vim you won't understand. If you do use vim, having mutt use vim for editing combined with vim-ish hotkeys makes for a very powerful, simple, and enjoyable tool.
Well, thanks for your insight but that was kind of a dick way to put it. What do you think is so hard to understand about the advantage of common key-bindings between applications?
Great trade-off though. You are such a cool hacker. Too bad you have to jump through hoops to view modern HTML formatted email. Hey you've got some vim key bindings though. Totally worth it.
A small enumeration of mutt's advantages in my experience:
- It's small, fast, and light. I have a mail client that runs in a terminal window (or console session, or remote SSH session). Navigation, search, and controls are all keybindings. It's fast to fire up, compose, edit, navigate, filter, and send.
- Threading. Mutt's thread-handling is second to none (though strongly influenced by newsreaders such as tin and slrn). Threads may be expanded, collapsed, marked read, navigated, joined, and split. Gmail's "conversation view" is a pale imitation.
- The "limit search" feature really rocks. If you want to find a mail from, say, the 14th of the month forward, from bigboss, subject "widget": "~l ~d 15- ~f bigboss ~s widget". You can filter by date ranges, add either AND or OR keyword matches, search by text, etc.
- Once you've identified a set of messages to look at, you can scan through them very quickly via keyboard navigation. Very useful if you're dealing with a large number of automatic / system-generated mail, though others can be handled as well. Literally: scan several hundred messages in a matter of seconds, looking for major differences.
- Tagged message management. Messages may be tagged ('' key), either individually, or using filter/match rules. Say you've looked at all your Nagios alerts and want to move them to an archive or delete them: "T.;s<archive-name><return>". Much faster than the equivalent in Gmail or any other GUI client I've used. This with limit search is the killer feature for me.
- In-line handling of MIME attachments. There are console-mode readers for many document formats, including HTML, Word docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Even if they don't give you a fully-formatted view of the document, you can get the gist of meaning without firing up a full-fledged GUI app.
- Spawning MIME attachments. If inline isn't sufficient, there's the attachment index (for mails with attachments) and you can launch these using the handler of your choice (specified by your mailcap file). Attachments may also be saved from the index individually or collectively.
- Adding attachments. Similar to the MIME viewer -- this is actually faster and more flexible than most GUI tools (in particular, Gmail). You can also add messages as attachments, not just files.
- Speaking of GMail: if you do want to view a message in its GUI wholeness, just pop open a browser and view it there through GMail. IMAP means you've got a synchronized set of folders locally and remotely. You can also share IMAP access with a local GUI client (KMail, Thunderbird, Evolution, etc.). This is particularly helpful for calendaring (I'm not aware of a MIME handler that will add ical event to a calendar).
- Comprehensive PGP support. It's highly unappreciated and underutilized, but both encryption and signatures are supported. At the very least you can confirm signatures readily on security bulletins from most major Linux distros.
- Incorporated address books for completion. Typically via an included 'aliases' file. Start typing a name, hit 'tab', and a screen of completions appear. Do this right an you can grab a list of related names in one pass. You can also alias lists of addresses you use frequently (say, "family" or "engineering team" or "zombie apocalypse task force").
I switched back to Mutt a few months ago after trying Mail.app (filtering wasn't up to my requirements, would hang often) and Thunderbird (bloated and slow under load). It's been a champion.
urlview.sh is pretty awful, mis-parsing urls constantly for me. I then discovered extract_url.pl[1], which is much, much better.
offlineimap likes to hang randomly - mail just stops coming in and the process never stops, requiring me to remove the lockfile by hand, then kill the process. I haven't found a replacement for it, unfortunately. Definitely open to suggestions on this front.
The linked view_attachment.sh file has problems, for example, with files with multiple dots in the filename (among others). I have made a few tweaks[2] to it to make it more robust. It still has a few issues, but I've found it to work better for the most part.
msmtp is probably unnecessary nowadays if you have a typical setup. For GMail, add the lines:
set smtp_url = smtp://your@email.com@smtp.gmail.com:587/
set smtp_pass = mah_password
to .muttrc and you should be ready to go.
I also wrote a very small, crappy applescript launcher to launch an iTerm with mutt from the OSX dock[3]. It won't open a second copy if already running, but I haven't been able to figure out how to display a badge on the dock to denote unread mail. It may not be possible.
I do almost exactly the same thing except I use getmail as my MRU and I have it checking many different email accounts (gmail, work mail, other work mail, etc). mutt is the best email client I've ever used. I like taking control of my email, using my own paid-for smtp service (tuffmail) and in general not relying on hosted email providers. procmail or maildrop are very handy too.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadhttp://notmuchmail.org/
More promising is this fork of mutt that adds notmuch support:
https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz
notmuch doesn't replace mutt, you use it with mutt/offlineimap etc as your mail indexer, which makes massive mail archives instantly searchable.. (and does this extremely well)
I suspect this what the grandparent was referring to, it's not intended as a mutt replacement, so to complain that it doesn't replace it well is a bit unfair
(notmuch is mentioned in the original link, btw)
[1] http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/
mutt can also use IMAP/SSL directly, and I do that for some accounts, where I don't want to have local storage.
Here's my setup for that, in case anyone is interested: https://gist.github.com/45e318c68eb5a52e1646. It's essentially a cronjob (LaunchAgent on OSX) that calls a shell script to update the index periodically, plus a few macros to make searching from within mutt easier. To use this, you'll need to create a "Search" folder for maildir-utils to store results in.
[1] http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/
I do prefer offline e-mail and I actually use Claws under Linux, an X11 port is available for Mac OS
Seems to provide similar functionality.
http://people.spodhuis.org/phil.pennock/software/mutt-patche...
It'll do search server-side, which means that you have Google's full text search without storing mail locally.
Thank goodness I already have mutt installed and configured (almost) to my liking.
https://bitbucket.org/sjl/dotfiles/
https://github.com/sjl/dotfiles
[1] https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz
Do you (or anyone else reading this for that matter) have any insight on how gmail -> imap works with labels when a single message has multiple labels? For example an email may be tagged with "clients" "$JOBNAME" and "receipt". Does it put multiple copies of the message in the local cache, or does it do a hard link, or ...?
So, by default, you're going to be storing multiple copies of each message. It's not a difficult task to use hardlinks instead if you want, but mutt can't make this judgement by itself, because not all of the metadata is identical, and mutt is designed for the general case, not specifically for Gmail.
Note that this is a Gmail issue, not strictly a mutt issue; other IMAP providers don't all have this awkward behavior.
Its user-interface is a bit mutt-influenced, but it's fully query-based and very fast, and of course you can extend it using elisp. A fairly young project, but it's near-fully documented, and the manual has instructions on how to set things up with Gmail.
Really appreciate the work, djcb.
mbsync does not watch or poll for changes, but you can run mbsync in a loop from your shell. Or, if you are running Linux on the mail server and client and use Maildirs, you can run mbsync from mswatch (http://mswatch.sourceforge.net/). (Disclaimer: I'm the author of mswatch.)
I use Thunderbird + Muttator for reading from my laptop and mutt through SSH when reading from e.g. work. I can even read it from my Android phone and tablet.
i use it with these macros
macro index <F8> "<shell-escape>mu find --clearlinks --format=links --linksdir=~/Mail/search " \ "mu find"
macro index <F9> "<change-folder-readonly>~/Mail/search<return>" \ "mu find results"
auto_view text/html alternative_order text/plain text text/html
That presents plain text first if it's multiply-encoded, but makes html available. In your mailcap:
text/html; /path/to/browser '%s'; description=HTML Text; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; nametemplate=%s.html
displays HTML in a browser window for you. mutt launches this when you choose to look at the html version.
But instead, your mailcap could have this:
text/html; lynx -dump %s; copiousoutput; nametemplate=%s.html
which mutt interprets as "filter this through lynx and display it in the terminal" which will solve 98% of your issues. It's fast, too.
Sparrow 1.6.4 was released on September 11, 2012. Mutt 1.5.21 was released on September 15, 2010.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Mutt may simply be at that point. I use Mutt as my primary MUA in a very similar manner to the author of the article, and I can't really say that there are any features that I want that it lacks. Of course, I can't speak for everyone on that point; for instance, some people actually want to send and receive HTML email, and Mutt can't easily deal with that. But for some of us, lack of HTML support is itself a feature, and when you really have to, piping a text/html MIME part to a browser for rendering is really easy to accomplish.
I know essentially nothing about Sparrow, but I suspect that it is a much newer product than Mutt, has had far less time to mature, and as such simply requires a more frequent release schedule than a project with Mutt's long history.
Basically, a comparison between most recent release dates doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means.
On a more serious note, I use Sparrow every day. About the only quibble I have with it is some of the icons aren't retina versions (hardly a dealbreaker). Otherwise I'd say it meets my needs very well; doesn't that also make it ‘done’, rather than ‘effectively dead’?
Nowadays I use 'Sup, but I might go (back) to Alpine, because its best feature - the indexer - is also its major drawback, since it hits the disk pretty heavily, which my VPS providers don't care for.
Also, one app became loved because it has a really innovative UI and the other is an app that eschews a modern UI. I'm not sure many people will logically make the leap from Sparrow to Mutt. More likely, people will gravitate back to to gmail.com, which should be getting a lot of improvements from the Sparrow team in the future.
http://dev.mutt.org/hg/mutt/ says two months.
Mutt is Open Source.
Stopped reading, right there. Why are we still fighting with things that are difficult/ugly to setup/configure? Could have been the best tool ever written, but if I have to spend a half a day figuring it out, and there are other tools that do it better, I'm out.
For other software, e.g. my editor, my mail client - software i'm producing content in, rather than consuming, i'll happily put in a few hours up front to get comfortable on the grounds that i will reap a greater reward in time saved medium term.
Don't use mutt, that's fine. But come up with some better justifications. (edit for full disclosure: I don't use mutt either, having to deal professionally with enough unreadable-in-plain-text mail that it makes more sense for me to do everything in Thunderbird.)
This seems like a pretty reasonable justification to me. Having spent a lot of time authoring emails in different tools, I'm comfortable with what I have. If what I have does what I want and the other tool that people are telling me is better has a disclaimer like the above, then what exactly am I doing wrong?
I'm all for trying out new tools and I spend hours doing so every week. I have to pick and choose what it is that I utilize. I wasn't arguing that the tool might not be valuable for some folks, just that it did a very good job of un-selling me, very quickly.
If I cared that much about ease of configuration, I'd use Textmate instead of Vim, and Colloquy instead of irssi.
Beyond that, if you truly want adoption for a tool, you'd invest time into making sure that you remove the obstacles of someone utilizing it. This is a tool that hasn't had any major releases since "September 15, 2010" and hasn't had any commits for two months.
Hit me all you want, but the same applies to Vim and Emacs for a large percentage of people who admire these tools.
People religiously defend them just because they are 20 something year old terminal GNU/Unixy programs.
If someone came up with Vim today, with a slick polished GUI interface, etc... you'd find far less people talking about how great it is and you'd find the same people who are appreciating them today, making fun of it.
I know that's a generalisation and doesn't involve everyone but I think it is not insignificant.
There are a minority who use and need the tool and appreciate it for what it is and have been long time users. For every 1 of those people, there are thousands more who simply follow the teachings of the cult to be in the cool nerds club.
There seems to be a pattern here, a recipe for a shitty (once useful) program that is no longer relevant that a group just doesn't want to let it go.
It kinda goes like this,
1. Be a 20-something year old program written by some GNU/Unix kernel/hardcore/early developer
2. Run in terminal with a million options and parameters
3. Be extensible with all sorts of weird text file configs, plugins etc...
4. Have a short weird-sounding name that is an abbreviation of some other weird phrase
That's all you need. Then no matter how terrible the user experience is and how outdated and irrelevant your program has become, you'll always have that cult who religiously love your program and insist on extending it so it can be a space shuttle as well as a text editor and an email client.
I should point out I'm not mocking any application in particular and I think many of these tools were fantastic for their times and some of them are still quite good today but my rant is towards this obsessive religious overly-appreciative culture of praising these softwares.
We are past that age of black screens and terminals and horrible user experiences. They were fine for their times but not anymore. I'm not gonna put up with an application that is almost as old as myself and spend hours to configure it just to be a little more efficient.
The efficiency argument seems more like an excuse, because you don't want to admit that you are putting up with the downsides of the application because of all other nerd-culture reasons.
</rant>
lol.
I'd used multiple email programs before finding my way to mutt, including various GUI programs. I'd used elm and pine briefly and somewhat enjoyed them. My primary mailer prior to mutt was Netscape's built-in mail client (NN3/4). The main problems with that were instability and some lack of flexibility.
Mutt took a week or so of getting used to ... and then ... just worked.
Not having an integrated editor (e.g.: making use of vim) was a huge win. One of the huge benefits of console-mode tools is that they can make use of one another in this way.
I've used a great many email clients since encountering mutt, and none are as fast, effective, reliable, and efficient as mutt. I keep coming back.
My complaints? Search through large volumes of mail (10s to 100s of thousands of messages) is slow. Google's use of tags is really useful, and more flexible than a highly-structured set of mailboxes. There are add-ons / forks of mutt which provide both features.
There's also a lot to be said for tools which work over a minimal configuration -- 24x80 vt100 emulation over serial line (your "last ditch" remote access method for most servers), SSH, Connectbot, console, etc.
Knock them all you want. The tools are useful, ubiquitous, standard, and effective.
The advantages were never enumerated. Most of the article was spent teaching you how to program ^H^H^H configure the thing.
What are the advantages?
E.g. try various combinations of "help = yes/no" and "status_on_top = yes/no" with the sidebar enabled. It's obvious that someone wrote it just to fit their configuration.
One advantage: you can configure mutt to behave just like vim (as far as shortcut keys go).
If you don't use vim you won't understand. If you do use vim, having mutt use vim for editing combined with vim-ish hotkeys makes for a very powerful, simple, and enjoyable tool.
Well, thanks for your insight but that was kind of a dick way to put it. What do you think is so hard to understand about the advantage of common key-bindings between applications?
Great trade-off though. You are such a cool hacker. Too bad you have to jump through hoops to view modern HTML formatted email. Hey you've got some vim key bindings though. Totally worth it.
- It's small, fast, and light. I have a mail client that runs in a terminal window (or console session, or remote SSH session). Navigation, search, and controls are all keybindings. It's fast to fire up, compose, edit, navigate, filter, and send.
- Threading. Mutt's thread-handling is second to none (though strongly influenced by newsreaders such as tin and slrn). Threads may be expanded, collapsed, marked read, navigated, joined, and split. Gmail's "conversation view" is a pale imitation.
- The "limit search" feature really rocks. If you want to find a mail from, say, the 14th of the month forward, from bigboss, subject "widget": "~l ~d 15- ~f bigboss ~s widget". You can filter by date ranges, add either AND or OR keyword matches, search by text, etc.
- Once you've identified a set of messages to look at, you can scan through them very quickly via keyboard navigation. Very useful if you're dealing with a large number of automatic / system-generated mail, though others can be handled as well. Literally: scan several hundred messages in a matter of seconds, looking for major differences.
- Tagged message management. Messages may be tagged ('' key), either individually, or using filter/match rules. Say you've looked at all your Nagios alerts and want to move them to an archive or delete them: "T.;s<archive-name><return>". Much faster than the equivalent in Gmail or any other GUI client I've used. This with limit search is the killer feature for me.
- In-line handling of MIME attachments. There are console-mode readers for many document formats, including HTML, Word docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Even if they don't give you a fully-formatted view of the document, you can get the gist of meaning without firing up a full-fledged GUI app.
- Spawning MIME attachments. If inline isn't sufficient, there's the attachment index (for mails with attachments) and you can launch these using the handler of your choice (specified by your mailcap file). Attachments may also be saved from the index individually or collectively.
- Adding attachments. Similar to the MIME viewer -- this is actually faster and more flexible than most GUI tools (in particular, Gmail). You can also add messages as attachments, not just files.
- Speaking of GMail: if you do want to view a message in its GUI wholeness, just pop open a browser and view it there through GMail. IMAP means you've got a synchronized set of folders locally and remotely. You can also share IMAP access with a local GUI client (KMail, Thunderbird, Evolution, etc.). This is particularly helpful for calendaring (I'm not aware of a MIME handler that will add ical event to a calendar).
- Comprehensive PGP support. It's highly unappreciated and underutilized, but both encryption and signatures are supported. At the very least you can confirm signatures readily on security bulletins from most major Linux distros.
- Incorporated address books for completion. Typically via an included 'aliases' file. Start typing a name, hit 'tab', and a screen of completions appear. Do this right an you can grab a list of related names in one pass. You can also alias lists of addresses you use frequently (say, "family" or "engineering team" or "zombie apocalypse task force").
urlview.sh is pretty awful, mis-parsing urls constantly for me. I then discovered extract_url.pl[1], which is much, much better.
offlineimap likes to hang randomly - mail just stops coming in and the process never stops, requiring me to remove the lockfile by hand, then kill the process. I haven't found a replacement for it, unfortunately. Definitely open to suggestions on this front.
The linked view_attachment.sh file has problems, for example, with files with multiple dots in the filename (among others). I have made a few tweaks[2] to it to make it more robust. It still has a few issues, but I've found it to work better for the most part.
msmtp is probably unnecessary nowadays if you have a typical setup. For GMail, add the lines:
to .muttrc and you should be ready to go.I also wrote a very small, crappy applescript launcher to launch an iTerm with mutt from the OSX dock[3]. It won't open a second copy if already running, but I haven't been able to figure out how to display a badge on the dock to denote unread mail. It may not be possible.
[1] http://www.memoryhole.net/~kyle/extract_url/
[2] https://github.com/xxx/dotfiles/blob/master/osx/mailcap/view...
[3] https://github.com/xxx/dotfiles/blob/master/osx/mutt/mutt-it...
Nowadays I have a cron script that kills any existing Offlineimap processes, and allows a new one to run through once. Works perfectly.