Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

i don't remember when i started using mutt, but i sat at a table with michael elkins at LUG meetings, and tried to be funny by saying "i didn't write mutt, it was me"

i have been using mutt for more than a decade after that, until i discovered sup (supmua). for me one of mutts's big weaknesses (and that of every other commandline client) was that it could only keep one mail folder open at one time. at some point i had four instances of mutt running in parallel in multiple screen/tmux windows so that i could switch between folders without having to reopen each one.

sup fixed that by allowing me to open multiple views and keeping state while switching between them. it also replaces folders with tags and an extensive search interface with saved searches that can be treated like virtual folders.

i haven't looked back.

sup inspired notmuch, that brings the search feature to other mail clients (including neomutt) but i don't know if neomutt also keeps state between views. i am sticking with sup because of that.

I use notmuch on Emacs (yes, found it after seeing sup).

For those who don't want to use Emacs, notmuch has other clients: https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/

alot was one of the early ones and last I checked (years ago) was quite featureful.

For people who want something other than mutt, I strongly recommend something based on notmuch. It also comes with Python bindings so it's easy to write complex rules to filter incoming email.

I also use notmuch and emacs.

I have always preferred text email clients. The first one I used was elm, then pine, then I was using gnus for a while but treating mail as news wasn't quite right. Switched to mutt, then back to emacs w/notmuch (using w3m to render HTML emails) and that has been the best for me for a number of years.

I use notmuch as well (with astroid as frontend), but I definitely think there are 2 big issues:

1. All clients except for the Emacs one are quite unfinished and development slowed down for quite a few of them.

2. Using it with multiple computers is not working well. I use two computers and am travelling often (so need offline access to my mail so can't just ssh into one machine). I have been using muchsync with an additional server (as the other computers are not always connected). The server syncs to the work exchange server using mbsync. That sort of works, but is brittle and sometimes things get out of sync (I had to search the the muchsync sqlite database recently to delete an entry) or break. I tried other solutions (e.g. sync the notmuch db using syncthing) but broke even more often. It gets even worse if you also use your phone for email like I do (you essentially have no search on the phone).

I think it is quite obvious that notmuch was designed by developers who use a single computer and don't travel much and don't see much value in mail on multiple devices. I really wish jmap would have better adoption because a jmap server with some local cache for offline work (similar to how e.g. mutt handles IMAP) would be the best solution IMO.

> All clients except for the Emacs one are quite unfinished and development slowed down for quite a few of them.

Curious what you find lacking in astroid or alot that is in Emacs.

Frankly, the Emacs one is quite barebones. I'm sure alot has a number of features not in the default Emacs client.

I still find astroid to be the best of the notmuch clients, however I've encountered a number of bugs (e.g. it messes up umlaut letters when replying) and it's not developed anymore. Also if you have a thread with several long unread emails scrolling up and down takes a while, this becomes especially annoying when you want to just open the an attachment. There were also issues about actions for attachments if I recall correctly (I haven't looked into that in a while). I've tried alot and neomutt at some point, but for both you can not view multiple emails at the same time, which is quite annoying.

when i travel i access mail from a laptop tethered through the phone. one big advantage of a terminal client is that this works even through a slow connection. especially in combination with mosh

But that means you have to have access to a server that runs constantly (I currently i do that as well for my work mail with muchsync) and you're just one step away from running a Mailserver. I'd like to move away from that solution because it feels hackish and overkill (sync from email server to "server", ssh into server for reading email)

Also I frequently need to search my when e.g. on a plane so the ssh solution doesnt work.

yes, true, i have that server, but i also have a small laptop that i can carry around everywhere. if i needed offline access to mails frequently, i would move email handling to that laptop. and even if i work on another device, i am able to run the laptop on the side and access it through ssh/mosh. in fact i do that for everything else. would that work for you?

Somewhat, but hackish. When I'm at home I use my desktop and if I follow your suggestion I would then have to turn on my laptop first to access my email. I appreciate the suggestions, but I think multi-device offline access is really not a well supported usecase with notmuch unfortunately. I'm sort of hacking around this with different sync options, but it sort of rubs me the wrong way that there is a mail server already, but I essentially have to set up another server (always on machine) to access the email. In the good old days ssh'ing into the mailserver and reading emails directly on the servers maildir made sense (although this still excludes offline work) and changes would also propagate to the server for access via imap. Unfortunately, having ssh access to the emailserver is incredibly rare these days.

you are right, it is a hack.

it works for me because i have other things that i always want to be available, so yes, i always have that small laptop running on the side.

it's a GPD pocket btw. when that dies i'll probably replace it with a pine-phone, smaller and cheaper, but has a solid keyboard accessory.

i have been thinking about a portable mini-server without keyboard and screen, but i haven't found one that comes with a rechargeable battery instead of requiring external power at all times.

i have considered my active phone, but i don't trust that enough.

> it's a GPD pocket btw. when that dies i'll probably replace it with a pine-phone, smaller and cheaper, but has a solid keyboard accessory.

I had never heard of it and just looked at the GPD pocket 2, quite a neat little machine.

> i have been thinking about a portable mini-server without keyboard and screen, but i haven't found one that comes with a rechargeable battery instead of requiring external power at all times.

I wonder if one could hack one of the mobile hotspots that one can get from several providers nowadays to run some server software. I suspect they run some sort of locked down linux or bsd.

mobile hotspot is an interesting idea. would most likely run openwrt.

quick search turns up this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/comments/u5jh0b/openwrt_4g_...

and it mentions this device:

https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/gl-e750

that does have a micro-sd card slot, which should give it enough space to store emails.

Yeah, the combination of offline access on multiple computers sounds tricky.

Offline access on a single computer is basically a core usecase notmuch was designed for.

Online access from multiple computers is trivial by writing a shell script that pretends to be notmuch but instead runs the real notmuch command on a remote machine through SSH. (Same trick applies to sending email too.) Works surprisingly well.

Have you found anything that does offline access across multiple computers well?

As I wrote in my post I use mbsync on a always on machine and muchsync to synchronize, and it works well for quite a while, but every couple of months I encounter an issue and end up spending several hours troubleshooting. I really wish there was something better, because I really like the speed and the keyboard centric navigation of notmuch clients.

Can notmuch or sup somehow store the tags on the IMAP server?

If I were to ever leave GMail (and there may be reasons to do so), it would be pretty painful for me to stop using tags. Folders don't cut it; many of my incoming emails have 2-3 tags. To have tags on my laptop but not on my phone (even in a rudimentary way) would be painful, too.

I can imagine that tags could be stored in some hidden / special folders, and a conforming client could be able to at least read them and synchronize with the local mail DB.

IMAP spec appears to support custom keywords (labels): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3632102/imap-custom-keyw... but not every IMAP server implements those.

it might also be difficult to synchronize those. (how would you get a list of all keyword changes since last time?)

tracking keyword changes locally and then submitting a hidden message with the changes seems like a hack (and how would you deal with conflicts?)

likewise tracking tags for all messages in a hidden location. (how much space would that take?)

i sympathize with the problem, but it looks like a non-trivial challenge to me. it's probably easier to solve the local sync issues.

IMAP does have a way to update flags for seen messages:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10689062/synchronize-rep...

and supposedly it is efficient, so this would work after all.

For Gmail you can use lieer. It uses Gmail API's to sync mail and labels between notmuch and Gmail.

https://github.com/gauteh/lieer

Many thanks!

Hey! I was at those LUG meetings with Michael Elkins too! You coming to SCALE?

i was at the conference before it was called SCALE, and i have been there to give a talk a few years ago, but it's to far for a regular visit now.

Ah yes LUGFest! My goodness. I'm sure I know you. I'm Chris Smith. You?

your name sounds very familiar, so it's quite likely we met. let's talk private. my email is in my profile, and i have mails from you in my email archive. watch your gmail spam folder.

i am also on libera-chat irc, there is a #hackernews channel

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