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Comment by cantrevealname | Hacker News Reader

> Let’s say this again, “email client”. The notion of email client itself is gone at this point.

Really? Is it lame to be using an email clients these days?

I still use an email client (Thunderbird) because I can't stand the thought of all my mail sitting forever on Goggle's or whoever's servers. Yes, I know that they could have secretly archived all of my email the moment it was sent or received, and that my privacy is not necessarily enhanced by downloading and storing my mail offline.

That's my main reason, but I can think of many other reasons to prefer email clients to a web interface.

I'm surprised by the sentiment that email clients are passé.

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I've actually been working on a new email client, and a terminal one at that. Shameless plug: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/aerc

Very cool! Going by the acronym, are you trying to make a Stallman-ish IMAP client that works well offline and only needs an occasional Internet connection to sync?

No, just that it does networking on a different thread. This is my main (but not only) problem with mutt. I'm not opposed to going in the direction you suggest, but think more mosh less stallman.

Are you planning to delegate editing and is it purely for reading?

Yes.

Me too. Mine has Lua-based scripting.

https://github.com/lumail/lumail2/

Gmail's web client also non-optionally auto-wraps text before sending, which is very annoying when you're trying to send a patch or part of a log file.

That issue basically forced me to switch from plain-text to html emails, and thence to the slippery slope of using italics and the OCD of syntax highlighting my code snippets..

I dread the slow insinuation of "the web" into email. Specifically, the need to use a rendering engine like Blink or Gecko to read an email.

Is there anything I can do to tempt you to switch back to plain-text emails?

In my defense, I still eschew html as far as possible. Even when I use html the messages are multipart, and the text versions usually are complete. I do this thing when I reply where I open the gmail menu, switch to plain text and then switch back to html. This has the effect of stripping out all styling from the message I am replying to, replacing html block quotes with conventional '>'s, and so on. That makes it easier for me to quote passages and so on.

I think of it as 99%[1] text/html with format=flowed, and if gmail ever added format=flowed to text mode[2] I'd switch back in a heartbeat.

[1] The remaining 1% of the time I'm composing something long enough that it has more in common with publishing than 1-1 communication.

[2] I wouldn't hold my breath: http://productforums.google.com/d/topic/gmail/Z42NibAOzjc/di.... More likely I'll stop using gmail one of these years..

Only in plain text mode, sadly. If you send an HTML message, a plain text version gets included, too, which isn't auto-wrapped. It's encoded as quoted-printable instead, which keeps lines short enough to be legal for SMTP but can be turned back into the original text by the client on the other end.

> Really? Is it lame to be using an email clients these days?

I think he means that wether nano is derived from an email client or not is not important

You might be right; I may have misinterpreted. He might be saying, "The notion of email client itself is gone from Nano at this point, everything changed about Nano".

For what is is worth, I read it in the same way as you. And found it kind of an odd statement, for a guy who has a website with a monospaced font...

Also my android phone has an email client. It's pretty nice to be able to view offline.

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