[HN Gopher] Meli - email client in the terminal, in the spirit o...
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Meli - email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt
Author : Klasiaster
Score : 99 points
Date : 2022-09-18 13:00 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (git.meli.delivery)
(TXT) w3m dump (git.meli.delivery)
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Tried this, it sat for 12 hours on "loading..." without success
| even though my inbox only has 17k mails in it. Given that neomutt
| is working fine, it's not a huge problem but it's always nice to
| have options.
| epilys wrote:
| Try using the latest commit if you're not already since the
| last tagged release had a lot of bugs that have been solved.
| Otherwise, could you file a bug in the issue tracker?
| https://git.meli.delivery/meli/meli/issues
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > my inbox only has 17k mails in it
|
| I can't tell if you're intentionally joking or are actually
| unaware of that being maybe a little much.
| Avamander wrote:
| It really shouldn't be too much. It's not the 80s.
|
| The same letters slapped into SQLite the most brute way would
| work (and perform better), so why the embarrassing slowdown?
| bugmen0t wrote:
| It shouldn't be. IMAP doesn't have to download all of them.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Oh, that's fair. I was questioning the reasonableness of
| _having_ 17k emails but you 're right, the software should
| be able to support it.
| seszett wrote:
| What are you doing with your old emails? Do you delete
| them? Or have you found a method to archive them that
| produces few folders with few emails in each and that
| works consistently over the decades?
|
| Because I haven't, and having everything in one folder
| works just fine with the clients I use.
| yonrg wrote:
| I use two folders, inbox (currently active mails, also
| sent ones) and trash, which is the ever growing pile of
| mails.
|
| Most importantly is the use of a mail indexer (notmuch
| currently) for searching and getting virtual mailbox
| viewes.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Oh, it's a nonsense, definitely, but it only gets cleaned
| out every 6 months or thereabouts and I've not yet
| translated the rules in my cleaning script to Sieve rules
| to do it automatically.
| johnklos wrote:
| I have 93,000 emails in my mail spool, and it opens in Pine
| in about 30 seconds on a 1 GHz AlphaServer, even when lots of
| other stuff is running at the same time.
| Ndymium wrote:
| Is it much? I have around 120k emails in my inbox. macOS
| Mail.app opens it in a jiffy. Computers are supposed to be
| fast nowadays.
| mxuribe wrote:
| My very first email account (when starting university in the
| early 90s) was via Pine on a unix machine; and i loved it! Sure,
| the excitement of "a new tech thing" was there, but also the
| fast, productive simplicity of it all: i can send a message to
| someone anywhere in the world quite easily! Years later when i
| started getting into linux as my personal machine/daily driver, i
| tried using mutt. Mutt didn't stick for me then. I give mutt (and
| other terminal clients like it) tons of respect, but for me it
| has been more an issue on my preference side; and nothing against
| mutt. And, now over the years (with linux very much my daily
| driver for years now), I find myself leveraging the terminal much
| much more - e.g. reading RSS feed via newsboat, etc....sort of a
| return to the basics, but basics that enable me to be far more
| productive. But one of the areas where i still can't seem to be
| comfortable in the terminal anymore is email. I think its because
| of attachments that i constantly need send and receive, and maybe
| the workflow for that is not ideal *for me* - i don't know. Or,
| maybe I've gotten so used to Thunderbird, that my brain seems
| happy there, where it has been happy in the terminak for other
| areas - who knows. In any case, i welcome more terminal apps!
| Yes, keep on improving mutt for others, but maybe this new one
| might work for me (and others who haven't clicked with mutt and
| its ilk). Kudos and good luck to the makers of Meli! (Who knows,
| maybe i'll give it a spin)
| jll29 wrote:
| I agree Pine was a cute little program, and it served many
| people well at the time.
|
| But the most important functions for me today in an email
| client are 1. fast search and 2. auto-complete of contacts and
| Pine/Alpine was lacking there.
|
| (Gmail has great search but its UX overall is lacking - I find
| it confusing in many ways and it suppresses important
| information (e.g. headers, sometimes even an e-mail's subject
| line). It would be nice to have a non-cloud email client with
| such a fast search.)
| akho wrote:
| I find notmuch search works fater for me than Gmail's did (no
| network round trip). It's maybe a bit dumber, but that does
| not matter too much in practice. meli seems to work with
| notmuch.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| I was thinking was using pine in a unix shell account at
| university in 2002 and I have the fondest memories! That was an
| awesome client
| buildbot wrote:
| People still use (al)pine at the University of Washington,
| where is was created! They even have stats on it going back a
| long time: https://staff.washington.edu/corey/pine-stats/
| [deleted]
| Emigre_ wrote:
| I'd like a terminal email client inspired by vim's usual keys and
| behaviour. I didn't particularly like mutt's default keys.
| mhd wrote:
| Hmm, how does this look on a regular 80x25 terminal?
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| I like the compact mode. It looks sleek.
| kleiba wrote:
| The problem is the HTML Emails I annoyingly get sent by non-tech
| people.
| layer8 wrote:
| In Mutt I auto-view those with w3m. The main limitation is that
| you can't reply while preserving the HTML (at least I know of
| no TUI HTML mail editor).
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| With mutt, you can tell it to pass HTML through an external
| program (like a text mode browser) to render to plain text. Not
| immediately obvious if meli supports that, but it is at least
| tractable.
| aduitsis wrote:
| Elinks for rendering html mail and antiword for rendering
| word documents inside the mutt message view.
| zhxshen wrote:
| I use aerc, which is similar to this, but written in Go. Most
| of these TUI mail clients have a configurable filter option for
| different MIME types. I've found that this program does a great
| job as an HTML to text filter:
|
| https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text
|
| I think the classic approach is to use something like lynx or
| w3m with networking disabled, but I wasn't impressed with the
| output.
| jarbus wrote:
| Does anyone know the status of gitea federation yet? This is the
| first repo I've seen in the wild that uses it
|
| But my god this client is beautiful
| tandav wrote:
| > And since I get asked this a ton, these federated features
| like federated following are (obviously) not in Gitea right
| now, but will probably be released in Gitea 1.18 in October.
|
| According to this blog post https://a.exozy.me/posts/gitea-
| actually-joins-the-fediverse/
| conaclos wrote:
| I could welcome any comparison with aerc (https://aerc-mail.org).
| BeetleB wrote:
| Does aerc support notmuch?
| falsifian wrote:
| Yes, I'm using it with notmuch, and it works reasonably well.
| A couple of caveats: - If you want to save outgoing mail, you
| need to include your own mail-sending script (mine is below).
| This is because aerc treats the notmuch backend as read-only.
| - For the same reason, you can't postpone messages with the
| notmuch backend. - I find it a little annoying jumping
| between search queries. Basically, I have to type out the new
| query each time. The aerc notmuch backend treats notmuch
| queries like folders, but it instantly forgets the previous
| "folder" existed when you go to a new one. It probably
| wouldn't be too hard to fix these; if I stick with aerc I'll
| probably try eventually.
|
| My mail-sending script; tested only on OpenBSD:
| #!/bin/sh # # Save a copy of an email in Sent,
| then send it with sendmail. set -e
| TMP=$(mktemp -d) cat > "$TMP/message" notmuch
| insert --folder=Sent < "$TMP/message" sendmail -f
| falsifian@falsifian.org "$@" < "$TMP/message" rm -r --
| "$TMP"
| Klasiaster wrote:
| With (al)pine in contrast to mutt you at least have filtering
| rules to move a mail to a folder. I hope that this would be added
| to meli, too - that's the last thing I would consider missing
| when reading the docs on the website: https://meli.delivery/
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Why not use procmail for it?
| sliken wrote:
| I did that, decades ago. Sieve is a very nice upgrade, safer,
| easier to read/write, and even had a web UI if you want.
| simmons wrote:
| I'm not the grandparent poster, but I'm not sure if this is
| what they had in mind by "filtering rules". When I read the
| comment, I immediately thought of how I use procmail for live
| sorting of incoming mail, but I also occasionally pull out
| al(pine) for various manual sorting/rearranging tasks. I've
| always found its "broaden/narrow selection + zoom" tools to
| be pretty powerful. (Maybe mutt has tools of similar
| capability; I don't know.)
| aduitsis wrote:
| Not exactly the same, but in mutt, there is a simple
| language which you can use to refer to a subset of the
| messages in your view. E.g. "~U" will match you unread
| messages, etc.
|
| You can group tag messages on mutt with any pattern you'd
| like and then move them. Or, you can limit your view to
| what you want to move, select some and then move them.
| elif wrote:
| love the name
| lwhsiao wrote:
| Love the recent efforts on building new terminal clients. I'm
| excited to try meli out. I've been using https://aerc-mail.org/
| as a daily driver for several months, but excited to try some
| others in this space. I found mutt a bit intimidating to
| configure, where aerc and meli seem more straightforward.
| nix23 wrote:
| Eh wow thanks for then tip (aerc) beeing a user of neomutt i
| definetly will try that one out.
| noloblo wrote:
| how to install aerc thanks
| jbaber wrote:
| Any hints at where the name comes from? It means "woman" in Toki
| Pona.
| epilys wrote:
| From the manpage meli(1) :
|
| > NAME > Meli Mail User Agent. meli is the Greek word for honey
|
| https://meli.delivery/documentation.html#meli.1
| chazeon wrote:
| I hope I can use this kind of client one day. The only thing
| stopping me is my bad English, which results in my reliance on
| Grammarly etc.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| https://github.com/emacs-grammarly try this
| zbuf wrote:
| I get excited when I hear of something like this, but then it
| often turns to indifference when "terminal" UI is shoe-horning
| GUI elements into large grids of UTF8. There's a time and place
| for GUI if that is the motivation, and for anything short of that
| my Pine/Alpine familiarity is going to be hard to beat.
|
| But what would be interesting is "command-line" for a modern
| email client. Similar in spirit to the old mh, perhaps. Concise
| commands for viewing folders, threads, searching, composing etc.
| Which integrate well with grep, xargs etc. for bulk operations.
|
| Rather than IMAP support, the heavy lifting of sync'ing Maildir
| folders could be done by dovecot, with searches by mairix.
| rakoo wrote:
| You're probably looking for notmuch, which integrates very well
| with other tools. There's also mblaze
| (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze) that might be of
| interest.
| zbuf wrote:
| I heard of notmuch, but I remember I dismissed it for
| whatever reason. Perhaps as it's a text UI, rather than
| command line.
|
| However, mblaze looks very promising. Thanks for that. It's
| almost literally what I had in my minds eye. It's light on
| dependencies and also packaged for Alpine Linux which is a
| good sign, and means I'm already trying it! :)
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Perhaps as it's a text UI, rather than command line.
|
| You must be completely confused with some other tool.
| notmuch is a command line tool.
| eduction wrote:
| Notmuch is fully command line, there are any number of
| traditional cli commands, it's a suite ala git but not a
| tui or anything:
|
| https://notmuchmail.org/doc/latest/
|
| See for example notmuch-search and notmuch-tag.
|
| Maybe you are thinking of notmuch-emacs or some other full
| blown client. There are many
| https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/
|
| Notmuch's core is largely in C and I believe the only
| serious dependency is Xapian.
| shakow wrote:
| Ironically enough (as it's not CLI, merely TUI), I find notmuch
| interface for emacs to fullfill this criterion.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| If this is "in the spirit of mutt", how is it different?
| bennyp101 wrote:
| I gotta ask, how do people use this in the real world?
|
| How do attachments and images work?
|
| Does it work with O365? Can I sync my calendars?
|
| Why not just use thunderbird or something?
|
| Genuinely curious
| natnatenathan wrote:
| I am also nostalgic for Pine, but what I think I really miss is
| the email from 1998, text only messages from my friends and
| professors.
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