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Comment by ryan-duve | Hacker News Reader

My professor used Mutt and I was always in awe every time I watched him zip through emails. From time to time I try to get into it, but always fail for a different reason.

This time, I made it about 30% of the way through this "quick guide" with a Gmail account. I don't want to have my password in plaintext, so I'm fine typing it in each time to get started, but I never got over the finish line. I got stuck somewhere around minimizing the number of system headers that go out with each message.

Please let me know if anyone has recommendations for a CLI email client that hooks up with Gmail on a modern Linux distro relatively simply.

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I made my own mutt-like CLI client from scratch.

https://meli.delivery/

Webassembly demo: https://meli.delivery/wasm2.html

Git: https://git.meli.delivery/meli/meli

Aside from the already recommended aerc, here's a fairly friendly and sane way to get started with neomutt: https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard

In general I find that most people who have (or claim) a productive workflow sync their mail locally (rather than letting the client connect directly over IMAP). So decoupling your reader application from your mail fetching application.

[mb/i]sync or offlineimap, with or without notmuch.

> In general I find that most people who have (or claim) a productive workflow sync their mail locally (rather than letting the client connect directly over IMAP). So decoupling your reader application from your mail fetching application.

Can't speak for others but when I was using mutt this is indeed what I was doing. It's just way, way easier, there are no IMAP quirks to jump through and you get excellent offline functionality pretty much for free.

I used aerc: https://aerc-mail.org/

Who is maintaining aerc’s fork? I know Drew DeVault abandoned the original version…

This is what I'm curious about - I remember seeing that DD is no longer maintaining aerc...

rjarry does :)

https://sr.ht/~rjarry/aerc/

> CLI email client that hooks up with Gmail

I'm not sure of the state of Gmail IMAP, but Mutt is "happiest" when you've got a classical UNIX system with mail being delivered locally. It's .. very old school. I suspect you could get 80% of the zipping benefit by learning all the Gmail keyboard commands (why is delete '#'? To avoid accidental usage? Is there a keyboard command for "label as"?)

label as = L + first letters of label

PINE/ALPINE is also great and available on pretty much every distro.

I used Pine for years after I began using it daily inside early stage Amazon, and kept using it on my own systems after I left. Like Mutt, it is still a very efficient email client that lets your quickly process a large amount of email.

> I got stuck somewhere around minimizing the number of system headers that go out with each message.

What system headers are you trying to minimize?

Currently using aerc. It could be better, but I can assure you I tried several of them and this was the only one that stuck!

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