The Grumpy Editor's guide to mail clients: introduction [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's guide to mail clients: introduction

Posted Jun 17, 2004 13:07 UTC (Thu) by leonid (subscriber, #4891)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to mail clients: introduction

I have been a happy Mutt user for few years now. Sometimes I try other MUAs just out curiosity, but none of them came even close to replacing Mutt for me.

Mutt, of course, is not by any chance a complete solution to all the email tasks. I, myself, use this setup:

fetchmail retrieves my email from several places and feeds it to exim
exim processes email and feeds it to procmail
procmail filters email into different mail folders, scripts, and whatever else I want. It also passes all messages through SpamAssassin.
I use mutt to work with folders, search and sort for messages, and all.
Vim is used from mutt for composing replies.
Mutt then passes reply messages to exim, which in turn delivers them.

This might sound as a complex system and indeed it is. It took me few years to build it and I am still modifying it according to my needs. I have my email setup exactly as I want it to be and that allows me to process few thousand messages a day and still do something useful. :)

Here are Mutt features that I consider very valuable:

console mode. Lightning fast with very flexible configuration. All key bindings and defaults are reconfigurable if need be.
support for mbox and Maildir mail folders. Support for POP/POPS/IMAP/IMAPS. These are about all ways of email storage that I forsee myself using ever. :)
threaded discussions. Something I cannot live without.
excellent support of mailing lists. One can teach it a lot about mailing lists you are subscribed to and will recognize them and behave accordingly.
flexible configuration that can be based on a number of things - console/xterm, destination address, current mail folder, etc...
flexible handling of attachments. It is easy to configure which attachments you want to see automatically and which not, and how to display them to you.
coloring. Very flexible color schemes. Colors can be assigned to headers, body, scores, matches, status, quoting, etc. These fastens the email processing a lot when you can focus on the important parts.
flexible use of external functionality. I have a number of message processing scripts binded to comfortable keys.

There is much more, but this should give you an idea. :)

I should also mention that Mutt has an excellent documentation shipped with the package. /etc/Muttrc will have all possible options with comments and possible values. There are a lot of patches that add all sorts of wierd functionality to mutt, like support for compressed mail folders, breaking and merging of threads, etc. mutt-users mailing list is also very helpful and fast responding.

... I hope I didn't sound like a sales person from the 50s. :)

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Yet another happy mutt user

Posted Jun 17, 2004 14:45 UTC (Thu) by vmole (subscriber, #111) [Link]

Two comments:

I'll repeat the enthusiastic endorsement of properly threaded messages. I got used to this with trn many years ago, and having it a mail client is indispensable, especially if you follow any high-volume lists.
While not exactly "scriptable", one can tag messages on a wide variety of criterion, and then perform actions on those messages, including piping them to external scripts. One can also define macros, and bind them to keys.

mutt

Posted Jun 17, 2004 15:34 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

I love mutt, but (last I checked) it doesn't work well for IMAP. It has
trouble handling more than one IMAP server, especially if they have
different login info. It also has no mailbox caching, which gets really
slow on big IMAP mailboxes.

It's great for local mailboxes though.

mutt

Posted Jun 18, 2004 1:07 UTC (Fri) by lakeland (subscriber, #1157) [Link]

Would a caching IMAP server fix your problems with mutt? It is a nice way
of giving lightning speed to clients that don't support disconnected IMAP.

caching IMAP

Posted Jun 24, 2004 18:12 UTC (Thu) by nobrowser (guest, #21196) [Link]

Hmm, what exactly do you mean by 'caching IMAP server'? I think the
complaint was about mutt not caching _messages_, not connections. Which
existing IMAP server actually caches messages?

mutt+offlineimap

Posted Jun 18, 2004 15:18 UTC (Fri) by vmole (subscriber, #111) [Link]

You might find offlineimap useful. It's syncs (in both directions) between local Maildirs and remote IMAP. This lets you use mutt locally, yet still get a consistent view of your mail via the IMAP server when you need it. Here's a Linux Journal article about it by the author.

mutt+offlineimap

Posted Jun 20, 2004 1:34 UTC (Sun) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link]

The author will probably come out of nowhere and flame me, but whenever I see a recommendation for offlineimap, I feel compelled to mention that, on two different occassions, offlineimap completely destroyed all my IMAP mailboxes and forced me to restore from backups. The author seems more interested in writing weird python user interface wrappers than in fixing the architectural defect which allows offlineimap to screw up majorly.

mutt+offlineimap

Posted Jun 21, 2004 14:53 UTC (Mon) by BigNachos (subscriber, #1867) [Link]

I don't think I've ever seen John flame someone, so I wouldn't worry about that.

Have you reported your problems to him? I'm sure he would be very interested to hear about them.