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Mutt 2.0 Release Notes
- azamba 6y agoDoes anyone use Mutt with gmail or alikes today? Is it worth it? Mutt was my preferred email client back in 2000-2004. But gave it up for Gmail web interface.
- Zhyl 6y agoYes, set up with Luke Smith's excellent mutt Wizard [0]. Contrary to the other point, having a local copy of my emails gives me a sense of security and I can set up scripts using normal scripting tools to move stuff around. `notmuch` is good, but actually I can meet most of my searching needs with a 'limit' filter. [0] https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard
- OxO4 6y agoFWIW, Luke Smith has some problematic political views (as in far right/alt-right). You do you but I personally avoid sharing/using any of his content for that reason.
- Zhyl 6y agoYeah, he also did some excellent YouTube videos and tutorials which helped me get into i3 and mutt, but I find it hard to recommend them now because they're mixed in on his channel with some weird ranty videos that, at best, don't have much to do with tech. I still recommend mutt Wizard though because it makes it so much easier to get everything set up. I feel like it should be absorbed into neomutt or similar because it feels like such a basic thing to get right.
- davidbanham 6y agoMutt and Gmail work fine together. I always find myself opening up the web UI when I need to search, though. I’ve taken a a few steps down the notmuch path a few times but it feels like such a big Thing to have to set up a whole local mail system just for search.
- freedomben 6y agoI'm considering it now that my nostalgia is flaring up. One thing that was a pain point in the past was offline use. If your mail provider is IMAP only then you need to hack stuff together to use offline. As a paranoid freak I prefer to have offline copies of everything.
- jlgaddis 6y agoIt's pretty easy to set up OfflineIMAP or isync or similar to sync a local copy of your mail (in fact, this is a great way to back up your IMAP mailboxes whether you use mutt or not!). Then you just point mutt at the local copy instead of the IMAP server and it doesn't matter if you're online or offline.
- freedomben 6y agoI don't remember if OfflineIMAP was the tool I tried or not, but at the time it was quite challenging. I always suspected that rate limiting on the mail server was blowing up the download tool, but I couldn't figure it out. This was a fair number of years ago though, so things are hopefully better now.
- pge 6y agoofflineimap works well with mutt to have everything accessible offline
- jjav 6y ago> I'm considering it now that my nostalgia is flaring up. That's one valid reason but it's unfortunate IMO to see it that way. Mutt (and similar, although I use mutt) are just so much inherently better than any web interface can ever be. The configurability and access to pipe content to other processes cannot be matched.
- dan00 6y agoI’m using gmail + mutt + isync. Because some people recommend offlineimap, I used it before and isync is better in any regard.
- ravi-delia 6y agoI use Mutt with gmail. For a while I hooked it up to read off the internet, but eventually I switched to OfflineIMAP, then to isync. For sending I us msmtp. Both are pretty straightforward to configure, especially compared to mutt itself. I'd definitely recommend using notmuch if you do decide to keep that local copy of your mail, the search is pretty incredible.
- aidenn0 6y agoWhat was the advantage of isync? I'm currently using offlineimap.
- feanaro 6y agoLast time I tried it, and I heard that's still the case, offlineimap had some sporadic instabilities that have not been fixed for years. I don't remember the exact details, but it just stops working in some situations and you have to restart it. isync/mbsync are rock-solid on the other hand and were really easy to set up.
- ravi-delia 6y agoI find that isync is much faster, and much more reliable. Offlineimap would often run out of memory, or silently fail dozens of times in a row.
- aidenn0 6y agoI've not seen it OOM, but I have 64GB of ram.
- dan00 6y agoisync doesn’t let the fan of my laptop cpu run. Yes, no joke, I could detect the running of offlineimap by the fan.
- jcantero 6y agoYes. > alias gmail='mutt -F ~/.mutt/muttrc_imap_gmail'
- trasz 6y agoDefinitely worth it. Two reasons: first, you can use it using your muscle memory (think vim), and second: it's fast. Many people nowadays are used to this (usually) slight lag in whatever you do via the web interfaces, but using something that reacts immediately is much nicer, at least to me.
- edoceo 6y agoHow about for the xoauth imap connection stuff gmail requires?
- _wldu 6y agoGetmail supports oauth. I use these tools for email: Getmail -> sortmail -> mutt Getmail just gets the email (pop or imap). sortmail is an MDA I wrote to replace procmail. It basically just filters emails into maildir folders. Mutt to read and respond to the emails.
- jjav 6y ago> Does anyone use Mutt with gmail or alikes today? Is it worth it? I use mutt with gmail account (and with everything else, although primarily I use my self-hosted email server). Works fine with gmail. > But gave it up for Gmail web interface. The web interface is so inferior, I can't imagine using it by choice (I'm forced by $EMPLOYER to use the gmail web interface, so I suffer through that pain daily). Anywhere that I have a choice, I use mutt.
- bsdubernerd 6y agoIt's almost unthinkable to me that you consider/ed gmail to be better. mutt was miles ahead of gmail already back then, and the difference just grew with the various gmail redesigns. I'd like to know why you gave it up for gmail. Is it because of the way terminal programs look?
- stjohnswarts 6y agoI know it's all opinion but I find I quite like using html mail and not having to worry about configuring a bunch of stuff on Gmail to get done what I want to do. As far as search it has always been sufficient and the speed is okay for what I do, I rarely get more than 10-20 emails a day.
- freedomben 6y agoSo mutt is still receiving releases? That's neat. I may have to revisit and see what's new in 2.0. I went through a CLI-only phase where I didn't use a desktop environment. My "DE" was just tmux in a pseudo-terminal. The main reason I went back to a graphical workstation was a need for G Suite and Slack's horrible support for Weechat. Mutt was a critical member of the toolkit and I have fond memories of hyper productivity. Search was crap though. If you're thinking about doing this, I recommend trying to live in a VM running Fedora Server or Arch or Ubuntu Server or something. If you find yourself unable to use a CLI browser for some reason, at least you don't have to tell work "sorry I gotta install my OS before I can look at <thing>" (that doesn't go over well).
- k2enemy 6y agoI you revisit, be sure to check out notmuch as the search backend. It is super fast and has a nice and powerful search syntax. [1] https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-mutt/ https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-mutt/
- em-bee 6y agohow is the folder handling with notmuch in mutt? i use sup (which is where notmuch came from) because it provides on-the-fly virtual folders where emails match a search query or a tag. i can also open multiple folders at once and switch between them without loosing state. it's been a while, but when i last used mutt it could not do that
- k2enemy 6y agoMutt cannot do multiple folders and keep state. Coincidentally, I used to use sup and it is my favorite mail client that I've used. At the time there was no way to sync changes back to maildir or some format that IMAP could sync. Is that still the case?
- rakoo 6y agoNo, maildir syncback has been merged for some time already (https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/wiki/Using-sup-with-other-clients https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/wiki/Using-sup-with-ot...): changes in sup are sent back to maildir, which is synchronized back to IMAP as usual !
- edward 6y agoSee also: https://neomutt.org/ https://neomutt.org/
- mseidl 6y agoI switched to neomutt a while ago.
- neolog 6y agoHow is it?
- gray_-_wolf 6y agoFine. With mutt I would need bunch of patches anyway, here they come from the upstream. They do have a bit of regressions from time to time, but they are fairly quick to respond with workarounds and fix it.
- icedchai 6y agoI use mutt for my self-hosted email server. Glad to see it's still being developed!
- JoshTriplett 6y ago> Automatic reconnect to IMAP on error Really looking forward to this. This was the one notable issue I had with mutt: if you lose your connection, it would forget which mails you marked as read, deleted, etc.
- RMPR 6y agoThat's what drove me initially to aerc + notmuch
- tjoff 6y agoThat works? One of the main reasons I'm considering switching from aerc to mutt/something else is because IMAP keeps disconnecting. Seems like the number 3 item you would want to nail down in a mail-client. But I'm sure it is just me that haven't looked into it yet. Unfortunately I just can't find time for it for the time being.
- DJHenk 6y agoI think it is much lower on the list for terminal-first users than that, as they use Aerc or Mutt solely for reading and writing mail on the local machine and rely on other programs to sync the incoming and outgoing mail with the external mail server. I use Aerc, but also msmtp for sending and mbsync for receiving mail, for instance. This aligns more with the Unix philosophy of combining multiple small programs that do only one thing well into a personalized workflow.
- RMPR 6y agoThis, and with notmuch it's awesome (the search is close to if not better than Gmail's one). I find myself less relying on the web interface of Gmail, except for HTML emails sigh. I know I can just install socksify, but it isn't packaged in my distro, and I already manage too much programs installed from source. I might write a blog post about this setup one day.
- tjoff 6y ago
- trasz 6y agoAutomatic reconnection is the last feature I've been missing. At this point, from my point of view, mutt is complete.
- em-bee 6y agoi see your point
- flas9sd 6y agothis one is very welcome: > If you sometimes forget a pattern modifier, you can type Tab after the ~ to get a list of pattern modifiers. these are useful to quickly filter for a string in the From: or any other header field
- gpanders 6y agoThe conditional option setting with MuttLisp will be very useful
- stevekemp 6y agoI was often frustrated there wasn't a complete scripting language integrated with Mutt, so people had to make hacks to do things in a fully scriptable fashion. I put together a console based client, inspired by mutt, but fully developed and configured with Lua to resolve that problem - https://lumail.org/ https://lumail.org/ I had a good few years working on it, and really liked the way it was "modal". Sadly I never quite got enough users to be worth continuing with. These days I pay for gsuite instead, and use offline IMAP only to keep a backup of the remote mails. It was an interesting thing to work on, and I've been following the new aerc client to see what happens there. I'm sure there is still room for new console based mail-clients, perhaps mine was just a bit too unfamiliar!
- gpanders 6y agoThat’s a real shame that lumail didn’t take off (I had never heard of it until now). I agree, embedding something like Lua or even Guile into Mutt seems like it would be very useful
- linsomniac 6y agoThis is awesome! Mutt holds a very special place in my heart, even though I haven't used it in like a decade. I did use it for a very long time, and it was fantastic! Well into the 2000s I had UUCP delivering email to postfix on my laptop, read and sent using mutt. UUCP was extremely capable for handling e-mail on a laptop, whether disconnected because I was traveling and on a CDMA connection, on a spotty wireless, or at the coffee shop. I have kind of given up on e-mail... I don't even check it daily for work, and a few times a week personally. I use gmail because they do a really good job of spam filtering and I don't have to deal with infrastructure.
- dilawar 6y agoThese days I don't use mutt much because I need to mark some emails as 'remind me later' and bluemail and gmail offers this functionality. Is there a mutt alternative?
- Sesse__ 6y agoUse shift-F to mark the email as “flag”. It's exactly the same functionality as Gmail's starring, and maps to it over IMAP.
- jlokier 6y agoThat's not the same function as "remind me later", which actually does remind you at a future time. I use shift-F in Mutt to flag emails. I then lose track of them, because I have too many flagged emails! Task-based tagging might be better (using Notmuch) but I haven't found a good workflow for this yet.
- charliebrownau 6y agoCan Mutt finally work with Tutanota + Protonmail in 2020-2021 ?
- dm319 6y agoJust in case anyone is curious as to why someone would use mutt, here are a few: 1. I can edit and compose emails in my favourite editor 2. Near instantaneous launch 3. Can launch multiple instances, allowing for viewing/searching to happen concurrently 4. Rapid search with advanced searching features - i.e. find all emails that have 1 or more attachments sent to me from within a month of 1/1/2019 from someone with a "csu" email - would be l ~f csu ~X > 0 ~d 1/1/2019*1m 5. Deal rapidly with emails - I have 'd' for delete and move to next and 'y' for archive and move to next, I can zip through emails quicker than on any other email client I have used 6. I can work effectively when I'm offline or have patchy internet/signal (i.e. on a train) using mbsync or similar to store emails locally and sync up with my gmail account when I have internet. 7. Highly configurable - custom set-up for what data I want to see in my inbox, and what colours to use and what to highlight 8. Intelligent reply-all - it knows I have several email aliases that belong to me so I don't reply to myself
- singingfish 6y agoMutt's still really useful. Need to deal with plain text messages or whole message bodies to send around to different places on the internet? Then mutt's what you need. Huge mail boxes that choke outlook? Mutt. I don't use it often these days but a mutt setup is super-handy.
- Scarbutt 6y agoHow do you send html emails? write the tags manually and sending it as text/html ?
- dm319 6y agoI found this [1], but I think something along those lines would work. [1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/36881/sending-html-with-mutt-or-another-terminal-mail-client https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/36881/sending-html-...
- WhyNotHugo 6y agoGenerally Mutt users don't. Personally I find the need for HTML email extremely unusual (maybe once every year or two?). My guess is that, for the average Mutt user, it's less than that.
- labawi 6y agoI like mutt and use it for some accounts, though there are ergonomic issues that bug me. For instance, there is no consistent way to cancel actions / exit prompts (or none that I noticed), while pressing <Esc> does nothing. I know terminals have issues with <Esc> but even double <Esc> just gives you ^[^[.
- leephillips 6y agoIt’s control-G. Effective use of Mutt requires at least skimming the manual.
- mel12345 6y agoSlightly tangential; I would love to use Mutt but the work email is on Exchange, which requires 2FA, and I haven't been able to figure out how to download the emails.