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Comment by azamba | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone use Mutt with gmail or alikes today? Is it worth it?

Mutt was my preferred email client back in 2000-2004. But gave it up for Gmail web interface.

Yes, set up with Luke Smith's excellent mutt Wizard [0].

Contrary to the other point, having a local copy of my emails gives me a sense of security and I can set up scripts using normal scripting tools to move stuff around. `notmuch` is good, but actually I can meet most of my searching needs with a 'limit' filter.

[0] https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard

FWIW, Luke Smith has some problematic political views (as in far right/alt-right). You do you but I personally avoid sharing/using any of his content for that reason.

Yeah, he also did some excellent YouTube videos and tutorials which helped me get into i3 and mutt, but I find it hard to recommend them now because they're mixed in on his channel with some weird ranty videos that, at best, don't have much to do with tech.

I still recommend mutt Wizard though because it makes it so much easier to get everything set up. I feel like it should be absorbed into neomutt or similar because it feels like such a basic thing to get right.

I use Mutt with gmail. For a while I hooked it up to read off the internet, but eventually I switched to OfflineIMAP, then to isync. For sending I us msmtp. Both are pretty straightforward to configure, especially compared to mutt itself. I'd definitely recommend using notmuch if you do decide to keep that local copy of your mail, the search is pretty incredible.

What was the advantage of isync? I'm currently using offlineimap.

Last time I tried it, and I heard that's still the case, offlineimap had some sporadic instabilities that have not been fixed for years. I don't remember the exact details, but it just stops working in some situations and you have to restart it.

isync/mbsync are rock-solid on the other hand and were really easy to set up.

I find that isync is much faster, and much more reliable. Offlineimap would often run out of memory, or silently fail dozens of times in a row.

I've not seen it OOM, but I have 64GB of ram.

isync doesn’t let the fan of my laptop cpu run. Yes, no joke, I could detect the running of offlineimap by the fan.

Definitely worth it. Two reasons: first, you can use it using your muscle memory (think vim), and second: it's fast. Many people nowadays are used to this (usually) slight lag in whatever you do via the web interfaces, but using something that reacts immediately is much nicer, at least to me.

> Does anyone use Mutt with gmail or alikes today? Is it worth it?

I use mutt with gmail account (and with everything else, although primarily I use my self-hosted email server). Works fine with gmail.

> But gave it up for Gmail web interface.

The web interface is so inferior, I can't imagine using it by choice (I'm forced by $EMPLOYER to use the gmail web interface, so I suffer through that pain daily).

Anywhere that I have a choice, I use mutt.

It's almost unthinkable to me that you consider/ed gmail to be better. mutt was miles ahead of gmail already back then, and the difference just grew with the various gmail redesigns.

I'd like to know why you gave it up for gmail. Is it because of the way terminal programs look?

I know it's all opinion but I find I quite like using html mail and not having to worry about configuring a bunch of stuff on Gmail to get done what I want to do. As far as search it has always been sufficient and the speed is okay for what I do, I rarely get more than 10-20 emails a day.

Mutt and Gmail work fine together. I always find myself opening up the web UI when I need to search, though. I’ve taken a a few steps down the notmuch path a few times but it feels like such a big Thing to have to set up a whole local mail system just for search.

I'm considering it now that my nostalgia is flaring up.

One thing that was a pain point in the past was offline use. If your mail provider is IMAP only then you need to hack stuff together to use offline. As a paranoid freak I prefer to have offline copies of everything.

It's pretty easy to set up OfflineIMAP or isync or similar to sync a local copy of your mail (in fact, this is a great way to back up your IMAP mailboxes whether you use mutt or not!).

Then you just point mutt at the local copy instead of the IMAP server and it doesn't matter if you're online or offline.

I don't remember if OfflineIMAP was the tool I tried or not, but at the time it was quite challenging. I always suspected that rate limiting on the mail server was blowing up the download tool, but I couldn't figure it out. This was a fair number of years ago though, so things are hopefully better now.

offlineimap works well with mutt to have everything accessible offline

> I'm considering it now that my nostalgia is flaring up.

That's one valid reason but it's unfortunate IMO to see it that way.

Mutt (and similar, although I use mutt) are just so much inherently better than any web interface can ever be. The configurability and access to pipe content to other processes cannot be matched.

I’m using gmail + mutt + isync. Because some people recommend offlineimap, I used it before and isync is better in any regard.

How about for the xoauth imap connection stuff gmail requires?

Getmail supports oauth.

I use these tools for email: Getmail -> sortmail -> mutt

Getmail just gets the email (pop or imap). sortmail is an MDA I wrote to replace procmail. It basically just filters emails into maildir folders. Mutt to read and respond to the emails.

Yes.

> alias gmail='mutt -F ~/.mutt/muttrc_imap_gmail'

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