[HN Gopher] A Quick Guide to Mutt
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A Quick Guide to Mutt
Author : cpp_frog
Score : 96 points
Date : 2023-02-06 12:10 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (srobb.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (srobb.net)
| jrm4 wrote:
| Anyone still successfully using this or similar in a hardcore
| Microsoft Outlook environment? My university keeps making it
| harder, last time it broke I essentially just gave up
| temporarily, and I keep intending to try to fix it. Any
| help/ideas/insight is appreciated.
| [deleted]
| rollcat wrote:
| Never touched mutt, but I've been using Emacs+notmuch for email
| for quite a long time (and you can use mutt+notmuch together,
| unfortunately TFA doesn't even mention it - it's really good
| when you have too much mail).
|
| My daily workflow involved quite a lot of mail, both from real
| people expecting a reply, and some automated reports. I've had
| many notmuch auto-tagging rules, and some custom Emacs key
| shortcuts to make tagging/sorting even more efficient. I think
| I've accumulated around 100k messages during my 4 years there.
|
| Around 2017, I moved on to a job in a smaller company, where
| everyone was sitting in the same building. Ditched that setup,
| and definitely not looking back ;)
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I use bower+notmuch; what's your emacs setup for using
| notmuch? Everything I find for emacs seems to be built around
| mu4e, and I don't want to recreate my tagging/moving/&c.
| notmuch setup in mu4e.
| pfortuny wrote:
| You will probably need davmail to download the mail from
| exchange before passing it on to offlineimap/whatever.
|
| I had to do that with my uni's corporate outlook mail, a real
| pain but it does work (although I use mu4e, not mutt, but have
| used the latter also).
| dsr_ wrote:
| The key advantage to mutt is the limit/tag/pattern workflow.
| Everything else is more or less the way other mail clients work.
|
| A pattern is a mail-specialized regular expression. There are
| shortcuts for the things that you are likely to be interested in:
| From and Cc, To, Subject, Date, status flags. After a few uses of
| each, they'll start to feel natural.
|
| The limit/tag/pattern workflow goes like this. Start in a mailbox
| view -- say, your overloaded Inbox. Use a limit pattern to see
| just a subset of the mailbox -- l ~fjira to limit to messages
| from a sender with jira in their name or address. Use T to tag a
| pattern -- by default the one you just used. Then prefix any
| command with ; to make it apply to all the tagged messages. That
| isn't just deleting them or moving them off to a different
| mailbox. You can forward them all as attachments, or respond to
| them all as one message, feed them to a command line process or
| give them a new status flag. You can also tag and untag messages
| one at a time, if you need fine control but don't want to figure
| out a narrowed pattern. Then, untag anything left and unlimit
| back to the full mailbox.
|
| The key is that this happens much faster than you can possibly
| make selections with a cursor in a GUI, and much faster than you
| can make selections with a scrolling TUI. And patterns don't miss
| something by accident.
|
| One of my favorite limit patterns is "l~d<2d ~d>1d\n" which I
| have aliased to ".y". It shows everything that came in yesterday.
| You might be surprised how often this is the view that shows you
| what you've missed. Another great one is "l~(!~fDOMAIN)\n" which
| shows only threads that have outside mail addresses in them.
| jjav wrote:
| > Everything else is more or less the way other mail clients
| work.
|
| Agreed on the limit/tag/pattern benefits, but there's even more
| to mutt. The greatest thing is how everything is configurable.
| It works and behaves exactly how you want, for any conceivable
| definition of want.
|
| Most software these days takes the Apple approach of imposing
| one single way of doing things and you will shut up and like
| it. Which I hate. Mutt is the complete opposite, configure
| everything to taste and enjoy.
| lelag wrote:
| A "Quick Guide" with at least 3 hours of reading material.
|
| I'm scared to see the "Complete Guide to Mutt".
| 3np wrote:
| I guess what you want is "Mutt: The good parts"
| ryan-duve wrote:
| My professor used Mutt and I was always in awe every time I
| watched him zip through emails. From time to time I try to get
| into it, but always fail for a different reason.
|
| This time, I made it about 30% of the way through this "quick
| guide" with a Gmail account. I don't want to have my password in
| plaintext, so I'm fine typing it in each time to get started, but
| I never got over the finish line. I got stuck somewhere around
| minimizing the number of system headers that go out with each
| message.
|
| Please let me know if anyone has recommendations for a CLI email
| client that hooks up with Gmail on a modern Linux distro
| relatively simply.
| 3np wrote:
| Aside from the already recommended aerc, here's a fairly
| friendly and sane way to get started with neomutt:
| https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard
|
| In general I find that most people who have (or claim) a
| productive workflow sync their mail locally (rather than
| letting the client connect directly over IMAP). So decoupling
| your reader application from your mail fetching application.
|
| [mb/i]sync or offlineimap, with or without notmuch.
| alxlaz wrote:
| > In general I find that most people who have (or claim) a
| productive workflow sync their mail locally (rather than
| letting the client connect directly over IMAP). So decoupling
| your reader application from your mail fetching application.
|
| Can't speak for others but when I was using mutt this is
| indeed what I was doing. It's just way, way easier, there are
| no IMAP quirks to jump through and you get excellent offline
| functionality pretty much for free.
| rkta wrote:
| > I got stuck somewhere around minimizing the number of system
| headers that go out with each message.
|
| What system headers are you trying to minimize?
| pjc50 wrote:
| > CLI email client that hooks up with Gmail
|
| I'm not sure of the state of Gmail IMAP, but Mutt is "happiest"
| when you've got a classical UNIX system with mail being
| delivered locally. It's .. very old school. I suspect you could
| get 80% of the zipping benefit by learning all the Gmail
| keyboard commands (why is delete '#'? To avoid accidental
| usage? Is there a keyboard command for "label as"?)
| AndrewSwift wrote:
| label as = L + first letters of label
| epilys wrote:
| I made my own mutt-like CLI client from scratch.
|
| https://meli.delivery/
|
| Webassembly demo: https://meli.delivery/wasm2.html
|
| Git: https://git.meli.delivery/meli/meli
| kenniskrag wrote:
| I used aerc: https://aerc-mail.org/
| anileated wrote:
| Who is maintaining aerc's fork? I know Drew DeVault abandoned
| the original version...
| hdb2 wrote:
| This is what I'm curious about - I remember seeing that DD
| is no longer maintaining aerc...
| lwhsiao wrote:
| rjarry does :)
|
| https://sr.ht/~rjarry/aerc/
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| PINE/ALPINE is also great and available on pretty much every
| distro.
| petemir wrote:
| Currently using aerc. It could be better, but I can assure you
| I tried several of them and this was the only one that stuck!
| cosmojg wrote:
| For fans of Mutt/NeoMutt looking to try something new, I've been
| getting a lot of mileage out of Aerc[1] and can recommend it as a
| somewhat more approachable alternative for the Mutt-curious.
|
| [1] https://aerc-mail.org/
| philonoist wrote:
| Is there something awesom like this for Windows 11?
| layer8 wrote:
| You can install Cygwin and run Mutt on that.
| wazoox wrote:
| I've been using for about 20 years fetchmail, procmail and
| spamassassin to locally deliver email, that I can then read
| either with mutt (when I'm remotely connected, mostly) or claws-
| mail. Frankly, nothing can beat that setup IMO :)
| jjav wrote:
| Same here, that is email in its natural habitat where it works
| best.
| topaz0 wrote:
| Note that this guide appears to be quite old, although there are
| updates as recently as 2022. E.g. there are _added_ notes about
| issues that were fixed in Fedora 10, which came out in 2009. (not
| that this should be considered as a negative -- it 's great that
| this resource is still useful after so many years. Just pointing
| out that this page appears to have a long history, and whatever
| idiosyncrasies come with that history).
| juped wrote:
| Please note that if you are reading this, you almost certainly
| want to skip everything before the "IMAP" heading.
| euroderf wrote:
| Can anyone point to a guide to using mutt with Protonmail ? I
| guess it needs the Bridge. I wonder if mutt "e" (edit mail) works
| with it.
| surteen wrote:
| David Petraeus, is that you?
| BirAdam wrote:
| You need the bridge, but after that mutt's standard IMAP
| configuration is usable. The key is that when you set your imap
| config you would do something like:
|
| set folder="imaps://127.0.0.1:1143/"
|
| and for SMTP you would do something like:
|
| set smtp_url="smtps://username@127.0.0.1:1025/"
| henry_flower wrote:
| Heh, I started using Mutt only because of "peer pressure" during
| my university years: all cool guys were using it! (Still with
| Mutt, > 10 years later.)
|
| I think this is somewhat akin to Emacs: startup costs are
| enormous, but you reap the fruits for the rest of your life.
| BirAdam wrote:
| I am most certainly not an Emacs fan, but I have similar
| thoughts about WordStar, Vim, and of course Mutt.
| user3939382 wrote:
| I went all-in on this https://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-
| homely-mutt/ at some point but was eventually forced to give up
| due to the problem of HTML emails. A lot of the emails I receive
| are HTML-only, and the step of launching a browser tab to make
| them legible was too big a PITA/slow. If I could find a tool kind
| of like Firefox's "reader view" that could convert HTML emails by
| default to something plaintext I'd be in business. Until then I'm
| on horrendously slow Thunderbird, but at least the lag pain is
| upfront launching the program and not per email.
| layer8 wrote:
| You can set up Mutt to display HTML mails with w3m or the like.
| That works very well.
| cbracken wrote:
| I know someone mentioned Lynx, another option is to set up your
| mailcap to view using w3m. For reference, see
| .config/mutt/{muttrc,mailcap} here:
| https://git.bracken.jp/dotfiles/files.html
| surteen wrote:
| Install lynx (or links or w3m). Add this to your ~/.muttrc:
|
| auto_view text/html
|
| alternative_order text/plain text/html
|
| Add this to ~/.mailcap:
|
| text/html; lynx -dump -localhost -force_html %s | sed 's/^
| *//'; copiousoutput
| user3939382 wrote:
| Thanks! I'll give that a shot.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Another option is piping email body into pandoc:
| pandoc -f html -t plain
|
| you have to try all three and see what works best. In my
| experience, pandoc tries to reproduce the page faithfully
| using ascii art, while lynx output is the easiest to read.
|
| If you're going to use w3m, it's wise to wrap it with
| socksify to prevent email spam from tracking you:
| export SOCKS_SERVER="127.0.0.1:1" exec socksify w3m
| -dump
| eqvinox wrote:
| On Linux, you can also use "unshare" in your mailcap, e.g.
| text/html; unshare -U -n lynx -assume_charset=%{charset}
| -stdin -dump; copiousoutput;
|
| This creates a new user namespace (-U) and then network
| namespace (-n), meaning there is no way for the lynx
| process to communicate with the outside world.
|
| (requires unprivileged userns, which is default enabled on
| recent distros. "sysctl -w
| kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1" if not.)
| incanus77 wrote:
| I am shocked -- shocked -- to see the guide I wrote 22 years ago
| on Mutt & GPG to be linked as relevant in this modern guide. I
| don't use the combo anymore, but there is sometime affirming to
| me about Mutt still being relevant after all this time. Good
| tools that do a good job are still valuable.
| jjav wrote:
| > I am shocked -- shocked -- to see the guide I wrote 22 years
| ago on Mutt & GPG to be linked as relevant in this modern
| guide. I don't use the combo anymore, but there is sometime
| affirming to me about Mutt still being relevant after all this
| time. Good tools that do a good job are still valuable.
|
| Yes! That should be the standard to aspire to with all
| software. Not the constant change for the sake of change.
|
| I set up a very highly customized (simplified) mutt setup for
| my parents in 1996 and the exact same setup continues to work
| today and my now-almost-100 year old parent continues to use
| it.
|
| Anyone who has tried to keep older people using software knows
| the nightmare of UI changes. Even a small movement in the
| placement of icons is a big hill to climb. Consistency is key.
| My parent has given up on using the web because both the
| browser and website UIs keep changing all the time, it becomes
| too frustrating for them. So they gave up.
|
| But thanks to mutt they continue to use email actively, nothing
| has changed since 1996 when they memorized how to use it.
| incanus77 wrote:
| That's amazing, and great perspective. I see with my own
| parents (one of them more so) how difficult they find UI
| changes. For a lot of people, it's not just finding the same-
| or similarly-named button, but spatial placement and
| appearance can also be important.
| zwayhowder wrote:
| I got as far as the assumption of POP3 for fetching mail and
| stopped reading TBH. Here was me hoping for some cool new guide
| about Mutt with Oauth or similar.
| znpy wrote:
| Well, the guide is from 1996...
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| POP3 is still useful. I have many addresses for various needs
| and don't need to store email on servers for almost all of
| them (mostly because it costs money). There is at least one
| IMAP client* that supports _fetching_ mail (not syncing like
| most of them do), but POP3 has much wider selection of
| clients and serves that need perfectly.
|
| *: https://github.com/nicm/fdm
| mattbillenstein wrote:
| I still use mutt mostly, but it's harder and harder as more
| emails come in as html - w3m only seems to get you so far...
| rinze wrote:
| For the HTML email that doesn't work as intended (which is not
| a lot, mostly newsletters, which I prefer to read via RSS), I
| use https://github.com/tshirtman/.mutt/blob/master/mutt_bgrun
| and this macro. It picks up the first HTML attachment in the
| mail, saves it to a local file and opens it in a Firefox tab
| (and Firefox is already typically running):
|
| macro index,pager ,b "<view-attachments>/html<enter><view-
| mailcap><exit>" "View first HTML attachment in browser"
|
| You'll need to combine it with this entry in .mailcap:
|
| text/html; mutt_bgrun /usr/bin/firefox %s >/dev/null 2>&1;
| needsterminal
| mattbillenstein wrote:
| Will give it a whirl, I also have a roundcube install on my
| mail server (via mail-in-a-box), so it's easy enough to just
| flip to a tab and read it there... Still only use mutt for
| composing.
| eqvinox wrote:
| That'll presumably load all the spam tracking pixels if you
| ever accidentally open a spam mail, no? Displaying HTML
| e-mails really needs to run with all external resource fetch
| disabled...
| lelanthran wrote:
| I stopped using local mail readers[1] when webmail became a thing
| - it was just too convenient.
|
| But I was still chugging along using the mozilla mail client to
| read usenet (or maybe there was a separate usenet client?)
|
| So after awhile I chose the path of least resistance and used the
| same local client for both email and usenet.
|
| And then gradually stopped using usenet, at which point webmail
| became a thing again for me.
|
| Now I use thunderbird, because local mail readers beat webmail
| interfaces for convenience factors.
|
| [1] First pine, then I upgraded to mutt.
| anthk wrote:
| Mutt is great with mbsync and mstmp.
| bitwize wrote:
| "How about you use a mail client from this century." --IT at a
| place I worked.
|
| Context: I was using Mutt to do email, and one day I found that
| Exchange was configured to send _only_ HTML versions of each
| message. If it received a plain text message, it would convert it
| to HTML -- including changing things like ":)" into J in
| Microsoft Symbol font or Webdings or whatever it was. Typically
| in an HTML mail environment, the plain text and HTML versions
| would both be sent as separate MIME attachments, but in this
| setup, only the HTML was included.
|
| I filed a ticket, requesting that plain text messages be enabled
| so I could read them easily in Mutt. This snippy remark was the
| only response from IT.
|
| So if you use a client like Mutt, be warned: nobody these days
| feels any obligation to support your retro email experience.
| mixedmath wrote:
| I routinely work with people using screen readers and for whom
| plain text email is perfect, while HTML email is a minefield of
| unreadability. It's worse that different email providers use
| different, inconsistent, and variable HTML formats.
|
| The more I work with people using accessibility tools, the more
| I realize that web accessibility is an afterthought (if thought
| about at all).
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(page generated 2023-02-06 23:01 UTC)