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Comment by jbk | Hacker News Reader

I still use mutt (and default to text), but I don't see anyone else doing this, even in my geek coworkers or friends. So I'm a bit surprised by this article.

I use mutt because it's very very fast, and quite customizable (I maintain a kind of 0-inbox through a set of hotkeys, + spamassin + procmail). To handle numerous mailing-lists with medium volume, it's so far the best I've seen.

I tried many email clients (on Windows, OSX and Linux), but I always come back to mutt, because it's the fastest to handle the high-volume of email I have...

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I've been using mutt exlusively for many years, and I got a fair amount of flack for it every now and then. While I like to believe that it's more secure than any full-featured bloated mail-client (hello Thunderbird), my reason for using mutt is simpler. I like the speed, efficiency and customization aspects of mutts, plus being able to use vim to compose my mails. Quite frankly, I don't get how people rave about text editors but then fail to include them in their mail workflow, which is where people spend quite a bit of time nowadays.

The other reason I like mutt is because it still conforms to the UNIX principle: One thing and one thing well. True, you could use mutt for SMTP/IMAP, but there are better tools for that. I use mutt with offlineimap, msmtp and mu (for searching).

Same here. I can sort through 300 emails in a few minutes, removing/organizing the cruft into folders, and keeping only a handful of them I need to reply to.

That, plus excellent PGP support, just makes mutt a much better email client that any other existing ones, local or web.

I'm also a mutt user. Love being able to edit documents with Vim, stable PGP support, and the mnemonic hot keys. However, I wish I knew more (or could remember more) about how it works...and I can't seem to get folders to synchronize properly from `offlineimap` (though `procmail` lets me search my mail rather easily).

Subscribe to LKML or one of the subsystem mailing lists (e.g. dri-devel). Pretty much the majority of Linux kernel developers seem to be using Mutt. (Disclosure: Me too, since 1997 in fact when I needed to replace ELM.)

Great article on getting started with Mutt on OS X: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/

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