The Grumpy Editor's guide to mail clients: introduction

Posted Jun 17, 2004 13:53 UTC (Thu) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029) [Link]

I think the "restrictiveness" that MH users (myself included) feel is not so much specific to mutt, but rather driven by the flexibility of MH. The fact that I can compose a message or a reply and while that's still active check out new mail (or cross-reference another message) is extremely useful, and what prompted me to switch from elm. I've also had situations where I'll be writing a message to a friend, and in the meantime another message comes in that demands immediate response. With a "drafts" folder in MH, this is no problem. Putting aside a message for later is also easy, though I'm sure mutt also has this capability.

Granted, some or all of these things can be done with the graphical mail clients. However, if you're using a terminal-based client, it's really tough to beat the level of flexibility in MH, and that flexibility comes from the fact that it's not a single client, but a suite of applications that run on the same directory structure.

That being said, MH isn't the only mail software I use. Since my mail has to be fetched via IMAP, I use fetchmail (both at work and at home). At work my script for fetchmail passes the messages to procmail for filtering, and I check the messages marked as spam using mutt. That's mainly because I've had some spam messages cause inc to segfault.

Another mail suite I could point out is IM, which seems to be included in mew (at least on RH). It's MH-like, and uses the same directories. It knows imap, though, which is nice, though it doesn't know krb5 in the context of imap. IM and MH are fairly easy to combine -- the only thing I had to do was use "imget" instead of "inc" -- but it doesn't update the MH context, so after getting new mail "curr" isn't updated.

Posted Jun 17, 2004 21:23 UTC (Thu) by ewen (subscriber, #4772) [Link]

Because MH commands are run from your normal shell you can easily intermix working with your mail and working on other things. This is both true in terms of individual commands (eg, read mail message, do work to action it, reply to mail message), and also in terms of working with mail messages (eg, using shell commands, or a perl script, or whatever to identify messages to work with). Mutt's tag facility provides some of the later approach, but it's not as easy to do incremental refinement.

MH's draft facilities lets you work on multiple (outgoing) messages at once, either in parallel (which I do frequently) or by deferring them for later. You can pick all the deferred replies when you start up again (comp -use N). While Mutt allows you to postpone a single message I've not found a good way to deal with multiple postponed messages in Mutt.

You can work on messages in multiple folders at once, or easily interleaved (in Mutt you need to change folders). I do this quite frequently as well.

The shell-based nature of MH also allows you to define lots of aliases (and I have as has every MH user I've come across) for various common tasks, to speed up your work. In contrast Mutt's got a fairly fixed set of commands, and the defaults for some commands (eg, refiling messges) are just wrong.

MH gives you full template control over display of message headers, and pre-building messages (new, and replies) and per-MIME-type control over what programs are used to display messages. This can be used for quite a lot of flexibility.

I used elm for about the first 5 years of my Internet mail usage, and have used MH for most of the last 10 years, and once I got used to MH I found it much more flexible than elm ever had been. Mutt is better than elm in that respect (eg, more external hooks), but still not as flexible as MH.

It's just a shame that MH has essentially been unmaintained for the last 6-7 years, and hence it's support for "modern mail concepts" is limited.

Ewen

Posted Jun 18, 2004 8:11 UTC (Fri) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link]

I am interested to know how you find mutt restrictive.

It lacks format strings for fine grained header control, default output formats etc. See mh-format(5). More information can be found in the MH book. For me, these are what really make MH indispensable. That and the ability to read my mail over a 9600 baud ssh connection through my mobile phone (which admittedly, mutt should also be able to do).

Posted Jun 21, 2004 12:54 UTC (Mon) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

'How do you find mutt restrictive?'.

The thing that really irritates me about mutt is its modal interface - i.e. the way I can only edit/view one message at a time and only have one mailbox open. I used to use 'Marcel' on RISC OS and that let me have as many mail folders as I liked open, and as many messages visible as I had room for, but still integrated with my favourite text editor. As synthesis of emails is what I do most of the day, this was great.

When I moved to GNU/Linux for mail I chose mutt and generally like it a lot, but to get mail from another message you need to quit editing the current one and postpone it, then open up another and save it somewhere like tmp then go back to the original and read in the other message in order to cut and paste.

Also the long delay in switching between mailboxes (Many of mine take >60 seconds to swtich between) makes for real inefficiency when referring to mails in a different mailbox/folder.

There may be solutions to these problems - I would love to hear about them. Just being able to 'pre-open' mailboxes would help a lot.