What is Reddit's opinion of Mutt?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

> That being said, still better than Windows.

That is my feeling with computers overall. They all suck bad time. Some of them just suck a little less. Debian being my goto for less sucky computing.

• After you read an email in mutt, you need to sync-mailbox by pressing $ (by default).

• Use the group-reply command, which I think is bound to g by default. (I've bound it to gr to be more mnemonic, and more like gmail, and because I've remapped G to last-entry to be more like vim.)

• Add set edit_headers to your .muttrc to be able to edit the subject, etc. while composing an email.

• Start building an alias file. First, in your .muttrc, add set alias_file = ~/.mutt/alias and source $alias_file to your .muttrc. Then in mutt, go to an email whose sender you want to add to your alias file. Hit a and just follow the directions. I usually follow the following format: alias jsmith John Smith <[email protected]>. Now I can hit m to start a new mail, type js<Tab> and have it completed.

• I'm not sure about gmail priority stuff, since I don't use it.

By the way, if you're planning to use mutt full time, you should take tomorrow morning off, brew a big pot of coffee, sit down, and read through the mutt manual, especially the configuration variables. Also google "mutt configuration" or "muttrc" and read how people have set theirs up. There are a ton of mutt gems out there which, once you find them, you can't imagine ever living without.

At LinuxCon Japan this year a person in the audience actually asked the Kernel developer panelists about how they handle all the mail on the LKML. The answer was that they generally don't.

The gist of it is that they use a lot of scripts to filter the mails from the LKML. I imagine Greg Kroah-Hartman (whose answer I remember) uses several rules that search for pattern in mails (either per grep, his own scripts and/or an MDA like procmail/maildrop) to funnel them into mail boxes which he then looks at when/if he thinks it is appropriate. He recommends the use of a relatively lightweight mail client that lets you work with the received mail in their original textual form (which is useful if you work with git format-patch and git am) effectively (he uses mutt AFAIK and I would recommend it too).

edit: Judging from gregkh's reply there may actually be Kernel people reading reddit afterall...

Thank you for your reply and elaboration of your program. I wonder, do you plan on sharing the source code to your program? I’d love to look at it as a hobby, but, more importantly, if you post your code publicly, people will be able to help develop the program into a more secure version; while user’s with a malicious intent may be able to find exploits more easily. Considering that your software is written entirely in c and asm, it wouldn’t be too hard for a black hat to find a vulnerability and exploit it as the code size is likely small relative to similar projects and debuggers such as ida, gnu dbg, etc. shouldn’t have the hardest time translating the machine code back into pure c.

That all being said, there is one specific program I always remember for its security and sustainability. It seems much in the vein of your program. It is mutt, a mail client. (http://www.mutt.org) this program is still fully usable and used consistently by security-conscious users, and yet, it has been around for two decades and has only seen a very small handful of version changes. To most, it would baffle that you can get away with ~10 or so patches over 2 decades, but mutt somehow managed to do it. Some of the methodology of the program that enabled this was to focus on a small codebase which prioritized internal security and consistency in simple and finite patterns. I’d check that program out for reference. To this day it stands secure fully usable.

Definitely. You can keep your big fonts and acres of white space, I'll stick with mutt.

700px wide paragraphs suggests this author has never been involved in long email chains before.

I would like people to send plain text emails as well or at least generate HTML emails that are humanly readable. TABLEs and complex DIV-structures might help to have your emails look good in a web browser or HTML enabled email client, but it makes the code also unreadable for those who don't use an HTML enabled email client.

sincerely,

a mutt user

It can do oauth2 too. Modern versions of mutt have a oauth2.py script that helps you get it set up. No need to use app passwords (our org has that turned off)

> "everything else is a mess, and is unpolished, and ..."

I may have been misinterpreted here. What I mean to say is that everything, including Windows, Android and iOS is a mess. But some are less messy than others. I very much like Debian for that reason. Updates and upgrades to the next version always works, for example. Something very important. Never really worked in many other distros. I haven't tried in a while, I must admit. Any bug throws an end user off. They have a hard time dealing with regular pop up messages, let alone with errors. Therefore you need polish. Whatever your isos are, they need to work "out of the box". Without dropping to the command line to do x and y. Not going to happen. Ubuntu has been most consistent in delivering that experience. They also had their bug or two. Everyone has. See above. All operating systems suck, IMHO. Ubuntu just sucks a little less. Fedora may be ok for this release. openSUSE, too, if you say so. But the next one?

It may help to use lighter-weight applications like Midori (lightweight web browser) and mutt (CLI email client). mocp (CLI music player) works for music from your hard drive.

"All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less." -me, circa 1995 (http://www.mutt.org/) (me not being me, it's the guy that wrote/writes Mutt)

All game library managers suck. Steam just sucks less.

Edit: I'm not advocating for Mutt (I don't think it's relevant in an age where emails contain images, and I don't think it supports displaying images embedded in it) it's just a memorable tag line.

> I use mutt, and have set text_flowed = yes set

It sounds like that requires your recipient's clients to support that setting.

The best solution would be to check if mutt has a setting is supposed to ignore single line breaks (/r/mutt?). You'd want it to work like reddit does (you need a blank line between paragraphs).

Alternatively, you could use vim's softwrapping with something like zenroom to make it look like hardwrapping. I think there was a similar post in /r/vim about this recently.

Mine is probably sightly esoteric but it works well.

Personal: Google Inbox - the majority of my personal email is non-actionable so this is a good workflow for it

Work: I use mutt with our work's Exchange system. I setup a variety of filters to ensure only important emails reach my inbox. Mutt's extensibility lets me specify keyboard shortcuts which let me deal with email quickly. Anything which needs an action gets forwarded to an email address to add to a Todoist list, everything else gets moved out of my inbox.

Alpine is just a fork of Pine, and as such you can use any editor with it, including Vim.

In fact, the same can be said of almost any command-line client, including the likes of Elm and Mutt.

Or, if you want to rock it truly old-school, you can try MH/nmh/xmh. ;-)

Lightweight is a term that is not clearly defined. Therefore, in my opinion, it depends on what you understand by it.

For example, I use Claws Mail (https://www.claws-mail.org) as my email client, which requires a little less than 20 MB of storage space. The e-mail client Mutt (http://www.mutt.org), on the other hand, requires less than 9 MB of storage space. Which of these is lightweight from your point of view?

Forgoing a GUI makes Linux very small indeed. And there are some very nice text-based interfaces like Ranger and Mutt.

With a GUI, well, there's LXDE and XFCE and a few others. Very easy on resources and processor time.

I'm not seeing it in the release notes anywhere, going back to 1.9, but apparently relatime isn't required anymore. Woohoo!

Also:

> According to section 3.6.4 of RFC 5322, an email message can have multiple parents (i. e., multiple message IDs in the in-reply-to header field). At least one email client (Mutt) allows the user to manually type multiple message IDs into the in-reply-to field of a message. Unfortunately, however, it seems that no email client has embraced this functionality to completely supplant forum software; the universal focus is on showing merely a linear thread.

And what the hell is wrong with him using mutt for email?

Is he antiquated and out of touch, or are we?

Are we better off for using a bloated email webapp that will only run on a computer made in the last three years, and too slow to use over a 2G connection? Designed by a "UX expert" that forces you to read and compose in only a small subset of the screen?

I suggest you checkout /r/unixporn for "recommendations".

Light email client: thunderbird, otherwise there is mutt.

File manager: Thunar is ok, but very unstable unfortunately. Sorting might be defined by the environment variables but I'm not sure.

ranger is good, but check nnn too.

I used neovim a lot (even as terminal multiplexer for some time) but i switched to emacs 2 weeks ago and my terminal usage has decreased drastically. Especially since often times I was editing a file like my NixOS conf or my dotfiles.. So I still live in the shell for many tasks but way less.

It's always good to know your shell and tools like ranger or mutt feel just right if you're used to it.

On the vim/emacs debate: i recommend you to learn vim and after maybe a year switch over to emacs and install the "evil" plugin. This plugin gives you the vim keybindings (which in my opinion are way ahead) while emacs has some strong advantages over vim in general (there are many youtube talks about that and it's also my experience). But if you want to be a power user, you will need to learn the basic keybindings for both vim AND emacs anyways. For example ctrl+n and ctrl+p are emacs bindings for next and previous. They're used in MANY unix tools. hjkl for movement as used in vim are also very popular, e.g. Qutebrowser works with them. If you know both, you can basically throw away your mouse and use the keyboard almost everywhere (especially with a window manager like i3wm).

This may sound like overkill, but installing Cygwin, and making sure that includes mutt, is almost certainly your best bet.

Mutt makes use of enough Unix / Linux utilities and features regardless that this will likely make for a better experience as well.

As I said, I've not used Windows in a decade or more, and there may be other, even easier ways, to go about getting Linux tools installed. Cygwin works and is tried, true, and tested with over two decades of history. (I'd first used it in the late 1990s.)

Most of the recent-ish Web results referencing mutt on Windows are using it with Cygwin. Including the official Mutt downloaad page.

If you're having issues with Cygwin, please say what.

There's an /r/cygwin on Reddit.

You can run if you want your own sync engine but I find it a bit too overkill...If you want full privacy then I suggest mutt or if you want a more graphical client then Thunderbird is in my personal opinion the only option.

Edit: the source for sync engine

Years ago I was using fetchmail to get my mail from various servers to store locally. At the time I was using mutt to read my email so I can't help with an IMAP server suggestion.

mutt can do IMAP IDLE (imap_idle in muttrc); you could then have incron check the new folder of your inbox and execute arbitrary scripts on the arrival of new mail.

I think it sacrifices modularity for minimal benefit (potentially swapping key-bindings for commands). The functionality isn't even a one-to-one map. For example, a common thing to do is bulk tag messages and apply commands. This is similar to visual, but since messages can be disjoint, it's not one-to-one.

Vim has a lot of excellent editing functionality (macros, registers, modal editing, motion commands, tabbed editing, quickfix, etc...) and I personally see general email functionality as largely orthogonal. There are places where the functionality isn't mostly orthogonal though, for example web browsing, but I still don't think it justifies using vim as a platform.

There's a lot of functionality to mutt that I don't think vmail can really support with its model, but I still think it's an interesting project.

I tried out all of the main email programs a few years ago when I started a new job (they don't allow forwarding to Gmail which was my previous solution). I used Evolution, Thunderbird and Kmail each for a week or so. Each one was really disappointing actually. Evolution felt heavy for an email program, and I noticed a few bugs that seemed to be present for others - such as it forgetting calendar events randomly. Kmail and Thunderbird were each OK, I didn't experience any bugs, though I didn't really enjoy the interface of either one very much.

After settling on Thunderbird for a month, I got fed up with it (some of the extensions I installed to fix the interface started mis-behaving), then Mozilla announced they were going to end support.

I ended up biting the bullet and setting up mutt. It's a terminal-based email client, so it runs in a terminal and uses any external editor for typing emails (I use Vim, but anything works). If that idea doesn't totally scare you, I recommend trying it. Once I got used to it, I feel so much more efficient doing email and it would be a serious pain to go back to anything else.

mutt does; the internal function is called decrypt-copy (or decrypt-save). Most other mail clients that I have encountered so far are a joke when it comes to handling encrypted email. They do not even support the decryption of messages that were encrypted with a key ID = 0x00000000 (anonymous recipient) which is just pathetic. Nota bene: decrypting your email does not compromise confidentiality if you use a proper disk encryption setup.