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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

aerc is really weird in the sense of being designed as a client, not storing the mails on your computer. Which has some performance implications and limitations. Though you can have local mail too, really felt like a second-class feature when I looked. But to be fair it has been a long time since I looked at it.

Given the above I'm really surprised that IMAP doesn't work better than it does. Often gets disconnected and I have to restart to get back to it.

Also have trouble with shortcut overlapping in neovim and aerc.

All in all, not super happy. I could maybe give it a second chance and see what I've missed in my setup, but currently more hopeful about neomutt.

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Using it with local mail dirs is definitely preferable. I would assume that most people use mail TUIs in conjunction with `mbsync`, `notmuch`, and similar utilities that improve the overall experience.

>Given the above I'm really surprised that IMAP doesn't work better than it does. Often gets disconnected and I have to restart to get back to it.

Same happens to me. This is gonna sound scuffed, but I just started running aerc in a while loop and I hit q to quit if it's acting up, only takes a couple seconds to load back up. Still my favorite mail client, but could definitely be better.

> Also have trouble with shortcut overlapping in neovim and aerc.

I'm curious what you mean by this. Doesn't Vim use almost every key on the keyboard, so wouldn't this be a problem with pretty much any program?

Yeah not sure what OP meant, it has a "passthrough" mode for composing, basically every key combo is passed to the editor (Helix in my case, very similar to Vim), and control is returned to aerc when you close the editor

The best email user agent, mutt, reconnects automatically if the connection to your IMAP server fails (although this seems not to work every time):

https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/

> aerc is really weird in the sense of being designed as a client, not storing the mails on your computer.

Isn't that true for mutt as well?

If anything, I feel it's the other way around for Mutt. I've been using Mutt for at least 10 years using local mail storage almost exclusively that entire time, and I've never found it to be cumbersome. I tried IMAP at one point, and I was not a fan.

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