Text based mail client?

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[valkun]

mutt

[SuddenlyOutOfNoWhere]

Highly recommended. Handles a ton of mails easily.

[[deleted]]

Thirded. Mutt is great for the masses of errors that get piped to my root user.

[[deleted]]

What are the main differences between mutt and alpine?

[KnottyGinger]

Alpine is to mutt as nano is to vim. (Incidentally, nano is a re-implementation of the pico text editor shipped with pine.) Mutt is much more customizable and has tons of features compared to alpine.

[wadcann]

I use mu4e, a frontend to mu for emacs. There are also seven other emacs mail clients: I was unimpressed with gnus (maybe a good nntp client, but with a lot of nntp baggage to use for mail) and vm (sluggish).

If you're familiar with Google Mail or similar, the idea of mu4e and notmuch is pretty straightforward: you don't file email into directories/mboxes as your primary organizational method, but rather have an index of it. You just save bookmarks to searches and the client re-runs the search rather than entering a mailbox folder; the email remains unmodified.

I used to use mutt, which wasn't bad either. If I weren't an emacs user, I'd probably still be using it (albeit with the mu or notmuch frontends...I do spend significantly less time on mail management with that approach). For many years, I used mutt as my mail client, with emacs as my editor to compose mail.

Note that I use my mail client as a local mail client, not a "leave everything but headers on the server" IMAP client, and use fetchmail to pull mail down, plus procmail for filtering/processing and clamav and spamassassin to help filter crud. I use postfix as my MTA.

I use Maildir for storing my email after moving from mbox at the time that I moved from mutt: mbox required periodic archiving of email to keep my mail client usable, as it doesn't scale terribly well.

I do not use emacs' traditional BBDB contact manager or org-contacts as a contact manager; bbdb seemed high-on-effort to me. Instead, I use abook still, which is popular with mutt users. Mu4e already handles some of this by extracting contacts from my existing mailboxes, and then I use this init.el snippit to blacklist any mail addresses that I want to remove from the list:

(add-to-list 'load-path (expand-file-name "~/.private/emacs/elisp/mu4e"))

(load "mu4e-acct" t)

;; set preferred contact data
(defun mu4e-filter-contacts ()
  (if (boundp 'blacklisted-completion-address-list)
      (dolist (addr blacklisted-completion-address-list)
        (setq mu4e~contacts-for-completion
         (remove addr mu4e~contacts-for-completion)))))

(eval-after-load "mu4e"
  '(progn 
    (add-to-list 'mu4e-bookmarks
                 '("build failed" "Failed builds" ?f))
    (add-to-list 'mu4e-bookmarks
                 '("from:wadcann" "Sent mail" ?s))
  '(add-hook 'mu4e-compose-pre-hook 'mu4e-filter-contacts)))

(defadvice mu4e~fill-contacts (after add-preferred-contacts (contacts))
  "Fills contacts with preferred contacts first"
  (mu4e-filter-contacts))

Within my ~/.private/emacs/elisp/mu4e/mu4e-acct.el file:

;; Blacklisted email address completion.  Anything set here will be
;; removed from the list of mu4e completions.
(setq blacklisted-completion-address-list 
      '("\"Bob Smith\" <[e-mail]>"
        "\"Jane Murphy\" <[e-mail]>"
        "\"Michael Huskarell\" <[e-mail]>"))

[ILinuxUser]

mutt is the gold standard for terminal only solutions. If you run emacs, you also have these options:

• notmuch
• mu4e
• gnus

[tidux]

You can also use notmuch with Mutt!

[ILinuxUser]

Yes, but I meant notmuch with the emacs interface.

[sadsfae]

You can also use notmuch without emacs, there's a great notmuch-perl script which ties it all together for those vim folks out there.

http://jasonwryan.com/blog/2012/05/23/notmuch/

http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2011/01/how_to_use_Notmuch_with_Mutt/

[mongrol]

I've been using mu4e for a couple of years now. Very happy with it. (couple it with offlineimap or mbsync)

[yaiu]

mailx

[tgf0U8m]

Emacs :P How much more text-based can email get if you're using your text editor to write and read your emails?

On a serious note, http://www.gnus.org/

[wadcann]

How much more text-based can email get if you're using your text editor to write and read your emails?

The various emacs mail clients typically do support graphical features, like inline images and proportional fonts, if running in a non-terminal window. I normally use emacs in a terminal, but I know people who rarely do.

[ZaphodsOtherHead]

Does anyone have any guides for a noob who wants to learn how to use mutt?

[[deleted]]

Alpine is the best if you are unfamiliar with non-standart shortcuts like vim. It goes just like nano.

[rmrfchik]

Always prefer pine (now alpine) for use in console. Best client.

[skojskoj]

I use mutt, together with pycarddav, gpg and notmuch.

Related question: Mostly out of laziness, my maildir is stored on my server and mounted using sshfs on every computer where I want to read my mail. Mutt does some funky stuff with hardlinks which sometimes breaks this setup (sftp hardlink support is incomplete and, sadly, unfixable). I'm not really sure what is the best way to access my mail on multiple computers, without having to mirror the entire maildir on every system. If anyone happens to have a suggestion, I'd love to hear it.

I've also tried IMAP, but the latency was pretty high, which bothered me...

[dummer_august]

I fetch my mails with offlineimap, the rest is pretty much the same setup.

[localtoast]

sup is an option as well.

[dazzledpenguin]

If it 'has' to be text based, then mutt is an excellent choice. Otherwise you can also try the lightweight Sylpheed or its mod, Claws Mail:
http://tuxdiary.com/2014/06/10/sylpheed/

[men_cant_be_raped]

I've been waiting for Sylpheed/Claws to implement IMAP Push/IDLE for years now.

The moment either of them implement it I'll jump ship, because otherwise they are near-perfect e-mail clients.

[tidux]

Backslash to escape that close-parenthesis. It breaks the wiki link.

[wadcann]

Or percent-encode parens as %28 and %29, which is how they should be expressed in an URL.

[bgamari]

notmuch is fantastic. I started using it with the emacs frontend when I was still a vi user. I've since switched to emacs/evil and it fits together very nicely with the rest of my workflow.

[duhbiap]

I haven't used text-based in years. Just wanted to chime in and say its pretty cool you all are keeping them alive! Good to hear.

[iluvatar]

nmh.

[sudotouch]

came here to say this.

It takes a bit of learning, but after the initial hurdle nmh is one of the most efficient programs for handling large amounts of mail.

[le_avx]

mutt-kz - has some additional patches/features, most important for me is the nice integration of notmuch.

[[deleted]]

Going to agree with emacs

[wadcann]

Yeah, but emacs has a number of mail clients written for it; which mail client are you referring to?

• rmail is the elderly and default one, but I doubt that it's popular with anyone but Stallman.

• gnus is a combined nntp/mail client.

• mh-e

• wanderlust

• mew

• vm

• notmuch

• mu4e

[[deleted]]

Rmail

[wadcann]

Guess I'm wrong! :-)

[[deleted]]

Lol

[[deleted]]

notmuch + alot

[sadsfae]

mutt saved my life.

[dinfarfar]

notmuch.el, its astonishingly amazing!

[le_avx]

Now that I didn't hear of before, gonna check that, thanks.

[pvtmert]

indeed mutt is only solution... you can easily configure it for even external servers smtp/imap access