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Mutt Fork Adds Features From Notmuch
Karel Zak started a fork of Mutt back in January to integrate features the upstream authors deemed too radical, and today released the first status update. So far implemented is native notmuch support (inspired by Sup) which adds fast search, tagging, and virtual folders from notmuch queries. Unlike the current hackish solutions, all of these are available as native mutt commands and can be used in your muttrc. Additionally, patches from Debian and other distributions will be integrated. Source is over at Github, and a few screenshots are on their wiki.
"Whats in your new release?"
"Notmuch"
"That's what I'm asking, what did you add that's not in the original software?"
"Notmuch"
"Oh... well, did you improve on the performance?"
"No, that's still the same as Mutt"
"Still as slow as a dog?"
"No, it's at least as fast as Mutt"
* it's fast
* it *doesn't* run javascript or display images
* it doesn't try to display messages in some ghastly proportional font.
* it doesn't fuck with my mailboxes or try to move/import them into it's own format.
* it's a mail reader. it doesn't pretend to be a mail sorter/filter as well, i leave that to procmail.
* excellent searching and tagging operations.
* regexp support for searching and tagging.
* it works identically for me whether i'm physically in front of the machine or connected via ssh.
* in combination with screen, I don't even have to restart mutt when i login, i just connect to the screen session.
* i get multi-folder support by running 20 or so mutts in the background, each one with a different mailbox open. switch using ^Z and shell fg command.
* no crappy built-in editor.
* 'set edit_headers' in .muttrc lets me edit the ALL of the headers as well as the body - convenient for trimming the To:/CC: list, or deleting unwanted In-Reply-To or References headers (i.e. lazy group reply for a new msg without hijacking an existing thread).
* lots of other benefits, too numerous to mention.
I use Mutt. I've also used various incarnations of Mozilla Mail, KMail, Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, a few webmail systems, and done test runs with a few mail clients I forgot the names of.
In the end, I came back to Mutt. It's the mail client I'm most productive with. I customized it to work the way I want. I'm used to it.
I think Mutt's strengths are:
* Customizable. Mutt is fairly easy to customize, and the customization goes a long way. Define things you want to do in terms of s-lang functions or shell commands, bind a key to them, and boom, now you can do everything you often do with a single keystroke.
* Good support for multiple e-mail addresses. I have a single account that I use with multiple e-mail addresses. Mutt makes this easy. A number of other mail clients I have used make this tedious. Some do not support it at all.
* Works in the terminal. I like to work in the terminal. I know many people don't. But if you do, this is an advantage.
* It works. I never have problems with it. I wish the same was true of all mail clients I've used.
Weaknesses:
* Slow on large maildirs. I have folders with tens of thousands of messages. These take long to open. Part of this is "many files that need to be statted, and stat is slow", but part of it is implementation choice. Some mail clients are way faster at this.
* Slow on IMAP folders. It looks like Mutt fetches messages or message headers one by one for each message. My mail server is over 100ms away. This makes things slow. My fault? Mutt's fault? Anyway, it's a disadvantage. Some mail clients do better.
* Wastes screen real-estate. I like that Mutt works in the terminal. But it wastes space. Graphic-mode mail clients can fit more information in the same space than Mutt does.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Who's using Mutt? Any serious email user who doesn't top-post. The crowds went to ICQ in late 90s, GaduGadu/MSN/... in 2000s, some Facebook junk in 2010s. Business users keep sending mails with no subject that have no content except for a Word or Excel attachment -- or even worse, a .bmp file (although that's typically embedded in a .docx nowadays).
I personally have Thunderbird/Icedove on all the time, used as nothing else but a glorified biff and a tool to view attachments sent by the business folk from the previous sentence. Any actual mails go via mutt ("actual mail" defined as something consisting of text rather than an almost bare attachment).
GUI clients tend to choke horribly on any mailing lists, or any structured conversations.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I use mutt. I tend to like straightforward programs that do what I need and nothing else, free of bloat, and, especially, that I can control from the keyboard without a mouse. Mutt is teh awesome.
-- tonybaldwin.me
It is also, in my experience, the easiest mail client to get working with gnupg.
-- tonybaldwin.me
Every other email client supports identities in the same clumsy fashion. Each and every identity must be individually configured in. That's fine when you four and they never change. It is nearly useless when you have 400 and add several new ones each week.
Mutt lets me define identities with regular expressions. I can set alternates=(.*@foo,example.com,.*@bar.example.com)
Now every user @foo.example.com and @bar.example.com will match as me, even ones I haven't thought up yet.
When sending a new message, I can type in whatever I want in the From: field. When the reply comes in, it is automatically recognized if it matches an established pattern. I haven't had to change my alternates in years even though I have added hundreds of identities.
I use it. I prefer software I can access through an SSH client (so I don't need any other special software on whatever machine I happen to be using). I used Pine for a while, but I got annoyed with the license issue that stopped Debian from shipping compiled binaries, and mutt handled threading better.
That was the reason for starting to use it. After that I've noticed a ton of details that are nice. It handles mailboxes with thousands of mails with acceptable speed. It lets me edit headers of outgoing mails - including content type headers, which all MUAs tend to get wrong every so often. I can use an editor of my choice. Decent search mechanism. &c, &c...
To be fair, it's a bit too complex for my taste, but I never did invest time in investigating how to switch to sup or notmuch, since it works.
May we live long and die out
Strongly seconded. Mutt is my mail client of choice -- and I've used quite a few over the decades that I've been online.
Mutt also:
- plays nice with tools like fetchmail, procmail and grepmail
- lets me use MY editor-of-choice (vi, of course)
- runs beautifully over low-bandwidth connections
- does not fill up my screen with pretty-but-useless crap
- allows me to define key bindings and macros to my taste
- I can use color-coding (when on a color-supporting tty) to highlight things like URLs, email addresses, etc.
- it does NOT parse HTML (HTML email is used exclusively by two groups of people: (1) spammers and (2) ignorant newbies who don't know any better.)
- it handles MIME sanely -- and has a nifty feature that lets you delete individual MIME attachments, which is very handy on occasion. Adding attachments is also quite easy.
- it supports multiple mailbox formats, it supports POP and IMAP
- it's highly resistant to attacks by design AND implementation
And so on.
"Any serious email user who doesn't top-post."
I once proposed that anyone who top-posted or full-quoted should lose a finger every time they did so. I believe that the overall quailty of mail traffic, particularly on large mailing lists, would be markedly improved in short order.
Regrettably, the RFC didn't find traction within the IETF. Pity.
Have you set your index_format? And have you tried pager_index_lines to split the screen into index + message view?
I'm glad that mutt isn't stagnating, and that there are people dedicated to keeping it awesome, relevant and supported. Rock on, you crazy forkers.
* it doesn't try to display messages in some ghastly proportional font.
I just don't understand this one. Proportionally spaced fonts are more readable -- that's why they're used in just about everything published in print and, yes, pretty much the entire Web. HTML is everywhere these days. There are no longer any network bandwidth constraints or storage space constraints that make sending HTML mail inefficient. Why do some people still get so fired up about keeping email in plain, unformatted text in a typewriter font? At this point, it seems like some sort of "geek cred" thing to me, which speaks volumes about engineer mentality vs. the value of clear, readable communication.
Breakfast served all day!
yes.
if you're used to pine, it will take a day or two to get used to mutt's keybindings. it'll probably piss you off while you're learning them, because there are some subtly annoying differences.
after that, you'll be glad you did and you'll never look back.
mutt's searching and tagging features alone are worth the switch.
it's about functionality, not fashion:
1. plain-text is readable by anything, and is easily grepped, piped, manipulated by standard tools, and otherwise *used*.
2. log file lines, programs, and tabulated data are all unreadable in proportional font.
3. 80 columns (72-78 is typical) is the standard for email.
the *only* valid excuse for including longer lines is when copy-pasting log lines or code fragments or similar. for discussion, reformat paragraphs with par (or fmt if you don't have par installed)
BTW, not all non-proportional fonts are as ugly as Courier. Deja-Vu Sans Mono is quite nice, for example.
I still prefer text e-mail readers (Mutt these days). I don't need fancy GUI, graphics, formatting, etc. Same for IRC and IM clients. Tin, nzbget, wget, aria2c, etc. Yes, I am old school so get off my lawn. Also, they are handy for slow and unstable Internet connections like dial-up for remote connections. Oh and more secured!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You could use .mailcap entries to pipe those attachments to appropriate viewers/readers.
people still use procmail in 2012 for the same reason they still use screwdrivers or hammers or other basic tools.
for the job that they do, there is nothing better.
maybe someday there'll be something that does mail filtering & sorting as well as procmail. and maybe someday there'll even be something that does a better job than procmail. when that day arrives i'll evaluate whether it provides enough of an improvement to be worth the effort of switching to it.
ps: you're the one who sounds like a 'luddite dick'. demonstrating your technophobia kind of gives it away.
"Any serious email user who doesn't top-post." I once proposed that anyone who top-posted or full-quoted should lose a finger every time they did so. I believe that the overall quailty of mail traffic, particularly on large mailing lists, would be markedly improved in short order. Regrettably, the RFC didn't find traction within the IETF. Pity.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
I actually just switched from Apple Mail back to Mutt, because a combination of Mail and an Exchange server ate a huge chunk of my email archive. I'm not sure if I'm really more productive, but I feel a lot more comfortable knowing I have a degree of control of what's going on, and that stuff is being stored in an open format (Mail switched from Maildir to something weirder a while back). Losing a chunk of my email archive was pretty traumatic.
The main thing holding me back was a decent email search feature -- I'd been watching notmuch for a while, and when I heard about muttkz, I compiled it and switched. I use davmail, offlineimap and muttkz. I use notmuch to search around 10 years of email.
I don't think this is a route I'd recommend for many others -- I've used mutt for years before Mail, and only switched over in the last couple of years. But it worked for me, and you did ask.
d.
I'm a bit divided on whether I like (al)pine or mutt more.
alpine does local deliveries well, but defaults to creating external lock files and requiring world write access (instead of more sensible 3775 permissions), which opens up for denial of service attacks. And what it does when new mail arrives is attrocious - you pretty much have to exit and re-enter.
Mutt on the other hand, defaults to color, which is rather annoying, and can't do local delivery but depends on the availability of a sendmail compatible MTA/MDA.
This more than eats up the size advantage it has over (al)pine.
I wish old ZMail was maintained. I know Netmanage released the source, and one of the original authors released a one-time fork, but that was years ago, and it doesn't easily compile on new systems. But it truly was a great client, especially since you could use it both under X and from the command line, and it had a really good scripting language.
name one.
it's not perfect, nothing is. but it's adequate.
or is that just your way of saying "it's too hard! waaah!"
mutt is "poorly featured". that's amusing...in the same way that a small child saying something fundamentally wrong but earnestly and sincerely believing it is amusing.
mutt is the full-featured email client. with many more features than can be found in *any* GUI mail client.
GUI mail clients typically have only one big feature - that they have a GUI interface.
In exchange, they've sacrificed pretty nearly every other useful feature that a mail client should have, other than the absolute basics of read, write, reply, forward, delete, etc.
Thunderbird makes a halfway decent effort at getting some of those features back in a GUI client (and with the External Editor plugin even lets you use gvim or your favourite editor), but none of the others do.
When you've got many or large folders, the switching time can be substantial.
Systems admin, with various alerts and notifications getting filtered to various places. Opening a folder with ~10k messages takes a few seconds, ~100k really starts to bog down. Once I'm in the folder, filtering, tagging, and other actions are really quick. Getting there is slow.
My compromise: screen with several mutt buffers open, primary ones are my inbox and other hot folders, others I'll switch between less-frequently read folders.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?