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Ask HN: Best Command Line Email Client?

24 points by buggy_code ↗ HN
I've used Alpine / Elm / Mutt. I've used gMail / Yahoo Mail / HotMail. I've used Evolution. I don't like any of them.

I spend 90%+ of my time on urxvt/screen/emacs/irssi. If I can get a email client that integrates nicely into this, it'd be ideal. What I think I really want is something that allows me to FUSE mount my email directory. So I can cd into my directories, ls to see new messages, write messages in a directory, and move them into ~/Mailbox/send/ ... to have them sent, etc ...

Anyone know of anything remotely like this? (Or a really cool email setup they use themselves.)

[On, on the FUSE side, I really like this since it allows me to use tools like grep, rm, sed / awk, ... to do funky things with my email.]

18 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 56.3 ms ] thread
jefftang
You want mh (mail handler) or perhaps a modern variant. I haven't used it in over a decade, but it's totally command line. Messages are actually files and folders are directories, so there's no need for FUSE or any wierd hacks like that. And there's a pretty decent emacs mode.
mitechka
Do look at MH and similar systems
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vasudeva
I've been really enjoying sup -- http://sup.rubyforge.org/ -- in fact, that really wordy quote about five down is mine.
antirez
I think I'm going to use this for some week.

Mutt -> Gmail -> Sup ? I hope so.

antirez
After the first 10 minutes of testing, imported my gmail account, wrote few test emails, I don't think this is really read for prime time. Also does not play well with my messing with my IMAP account via other clients. Is slower than gmail since for some reason the IMAP account is accessed to retrieve messages when I open a thread.

Btw to be able to write new emails with vim again is a joy... Still almost everything Sup is doing is in theory possible to do in a web-based or resident application with improved font rendering, simple icons to signal status of messages and so on.

Remember xchat? This IRC client had a lesson, it was possible to retain everything of good there was in text-only IRC clients, and add the good stuff of GUIs. The nerd email client I'm waiting for is something like this.

Fast: just scan IMAP for new messages but take everything local otherwise.

Great interface: mixed between curses but with improved rendering and config menus thanks to GUI toolkit or even web-based can be ok.

Easy to configure: unlike mutt for example. Spun is nice from this POV at least for the first steps.

Give me my editor: if resident, fire vim for me in some way, otherwise implement a decent editor with vim and emacs key bindings if it's web based.

It's worth to note that even a web-mail can be scriptable, using javascript.

RobGR
As a stop-gap measure, you might find that one of the extensions or plugins that let's you edit text boxes in a browser using vim or emacs would help in using gmail.
antirez
Yes I used to have one of this extensions, don't remember the name but was capable of editing with Vim all the textarea elements in every web page. To switch between firefox and xterm was not very comfortable at least with my window manager. What I could like more is an extension that can give vim features to the browser text area.

Btw there is something strange going on here: the textarea is the most popular text editor out there, the most used one where millions of people write short and long text every day, and still browser developers are not realizing that it should be improved.

RobGR
I currently use gnus in xemacs.

I don't like it, but it is better than the other options I have tried. However, I may revist mutt, it has been a long time since I messed with that.

I originally went to gnus because I am on a lot of mailing lists and I liked the idea of handling mailling lists the same way I read usenet. I still want that, and I would probably need to do a lot of custom configuration to get that with mutt.

It took me a while to realize that by your "FUSE" comments you expected the mail reader to keep the mail in it's own format, and you just wanted it exposed to other tools. The useful mail clients offer a variety of back-ends, from Maildir to mbox to a remote imap server, and you can handle mbox and Mailder with grep and etc.

lincolnq
I still use mutt. It's not great, but it's better than anything else I've tried. I ssh to my mail server and run mutt in a screen. My mail server has imap and webmail set up too, so it's fairly convenient no matter where I am.

I've wanted Mutt to be properly scriptable; it doesn't have much good in the way of configuration. I've been casually puttering around ideas for a long time about writing my own email client that's much more customizable. Maybe use a database backend?

Edit: looking at Sup, maybe it's what I want.

likpok
You could just write a FUSE driver to support this. It would not be very hard.

Since that sounds like what you want, why not do it?

silentbicycle
nmh and its Emacs client, mh-e, are pretty nice, and are an excellent fit for working in screen. It's been a couple years since I used it actively, but it's worth a look.

nmh in particular is a bundle of small command-line programs that "just" dump out a list of subject lines for unread messages, etc. Easy to build on.