Hacker News Reader

Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

It's been many years since I've used mutt, but I'm considering going back to it. For a while, HTML email had become so common that it was uncomfortable to use a text email client, but that trend seems to have reversed...most of my business communication is plain text (maybe a shift in the people I interact with for business). The speed of mutt is damned near impossible to beat, and the bandwidth usage is so tiny (I can run it on the server, rather than locally, so only the mails I actually open get transferred). I'm living on the road again, and mobile internet has gotten incredibly expensive (I spend approximately $300/month on Internet now, even with very little video and large downloads), so I've been using a web-based mail client more often (Usermin, which is one that I work on, so it's an "eat your own dog food" situation), but it is currently not particularly fast for dealing with hundreds of emails per day.

View on HN

Most MUAs these days send multipart/alternative messages, so even though most recipients see the fancy HTML version, the message also has a text/plain version that mutt will default to showing and you won't even notice it had an HTML part.

For those rare HTML-only mails, just install lynx and add this to ~/.mailcap:

     text/html; lynx -dump -localhost -force_html -width 80 %s; copiousoutput

This will make mutt pipe the html content to lynx, which will render it and spit back a plaintext version with all the embedded links at the bottom. You'll be able to easily scroll through the message in mutt as though it were plaintext.

For all those who prefer w3m:

    text/html; /usr/bin/w3m -I %{charset} -T text/html -o display_link_number=1 -dump; copiousoutput

Sync maildirs with unison. A lack of Internet access becomes a great time to catch up on email.

Where do you live / travel where you are spending $300 a month on Internet? I live in Australia (not the cheapest place) and spend $50 AUD a month for 12G of data and free international calls to 10 countries.

In the US we also have T-mobile with unlimited internet (limited highspeed internet)

I have T-Mobile, with 36GB of data spread across two devices. I also have Karma (it was the "Neverstop" plan, until they bait-and-switched that out of existence) with 10GB. I have two plans because T-Mobile network is awful in some places. I share internet with my girlfriend, so it's not just one person using this much data...but, I do use a lot of data.

Edit: T-Mobile "unlimited" is bullshit. It is only unlimited for the phone itself. Hotspot usage is rate limited to an unusably slow rate after data allowances is used (the limited rate is usually well below the 128kbps they claim, but even when it is reaching 128bps, that's unusable for the modern web, and the latency is horrific, so even shell sessions are impossible once you hit the cap). The only reason I stick with T-Mobile is BingeOn lets me watch Netflix without using much data; though the crappy speed of it makes it unworkable in a lot of locations. But, don't believe their marketing about "unlimited" data. It is not. T-Mobile also seems to measure bandwidth usage in a shady way; I use about 1GB a day on Karma...same kind of usage results in 2GB+ a day on T-Mobile. I haven't analyzed what's really going on with any precision, but I've noticed the discrepancy on a few occasions; it has happened often enough and to a large enough degree to where I think the smoke is indicative of a fire.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com