Using gmail with mutt (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Using gmail with mutt (2016)

smalldata.tech

63 pointswheresvic118 comments

I tried this a while ago. And while it's fun, you realise most emails are heavy in html/images/attachments and barely readable in full text form anymore... :/

Would be a cool project to create a Terminal email client that embedd an html to ascii rendering engine to make that work.

You should be able to use aalib to accomplish this.

I've been using mutt as my only email client for over 10 years now. You are right that a lot of emails are HTML only, but you can use something like w3m or lynx to render the HTML inside of mutt, and it is pretty rare that images in emails actually matter. (Mostly they are company logos or other non-useful crap...)

And even better: You avoid loading any external resources, which both avoids the data leak, and prevents the sender from modifying the content of the received email.

Gmail relatively recently changed to intercept images and cache them all for you, preventing the leak. But then, this is Google we’re talking about. I’m sure there’s still a leak, maybe via AMP for Email. (Of course, hyperlinks are also often used for tracking.)

Only images? So, fonts can still be used to leak and manipulate?

Well, no, custom web fonts generally aren’t supported by email clients, email within Gmail is sanitized by default.

And I stand slightly corrected: by customizing email image URLs, you can apparently track the first open, but not user details (IP address, device, subsequent opens, etc.) https://customer.io/blog/gmail-loading-images.html

When I use the web mail I always keep images off anyway.

I pine (pun intended) for command line mh, but my eyes glaze over when I consider dealing with the issues you raise.

I used pine from 1997-2004 or so. By the end, emails were getting pretty unreadable because everyone else's client was sending HTML. I wasn't savvy enough at the time to use lynx as a viewer.

> And while it's fun, you realise most emails are heavy in html/images/attachments and barely readable in full text form anymore... :/

That’s why I use notmuch with emacs. I can view text emails as text & HTML emails as HTML — and I can open them in an external browser, too, with just a few keystrokes.

Also, a local notmuch is extremely fast. I find that it’s far, far faster than Gmail or Inbox.

I go through this routine about once a year. Somehow, I get it in my head that a Mutt setup would be better than the multiple webmail setup I currently deal with (Gmail and Office 365). Sometimes I do a pure IMAP setup, sometimes using offlineimap to mirror the entire mailbox. Each time, I realize how much html email there is and how difficult it is to quickly review attachments. Both of these can be handled well with a good mailcap file, but the extra hassles just make it just a bit too difficult to switch over completely. I always end up back with webmail after a few days.

Maybe one time, I'll be able to stick with mutt.

Another option is to keep a local mirror of your gmail, this can be one or two way and with or without tags.

https://github.com/gauteh/gmailieer and http://isync.sourceforge.net/ are tools I've used for this. isync/mbsync is a high performance IMAP based syncing tool that works well with for large mail spools. gmailieer uses the gmail API so it only works with gmail but has good support for two-way tag syncing.

Some advantages of this approach are very fast local access and and the ability to use your preferred local indexing and tagging tools (notmuch under emacs in my case).

PS, I forgot that gmailieer is notmuch-only but I think some mutt users use notmuch for indexing so it could still be useful.

I've had a lot of bad luck with isync. Gmail keeps locking IMAPS access, even if "insecure app access" is enabled. When trying to access the account through thunderbird, it redirects to an online login page to authorize the app, presumably through Google auth service to get an access token. I'm not sure it can be worked-around without implementing the same logic in isync :-(

edit: using the trick in the page seems to have done the worked. It would seem that my account access got locked during my last attempt. Time to run some backup !

I've used OfflineIMAP[0] for this sort of thing successfully, but gmailieer & isync do sound interesting — particularly the ‘high performance’ bit about the latter. OfflineIMAP is not exactly a speed demon.

0: http://www.offlineimap.org/

Interesting. Until this post, I hadn’t realized plain old username/password Gmail authentication had been blocked, in most cases: https://support.google.com/a/answer/6260879?hl=en

life is too short.

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