Comment by djha-skin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djha-skin | Hacker News Reader

I have plumbed the depths of mutt, and I have discovered that, alas, graphical email clients fit my needs better.

- Mutt/aerc doesn't support windows, an OS many use by preference or requirement (though I have explored this with mutt[2], it's hard getting anything to work in mailcap on windows)

- Doesn't support viewing HTML email, a ubiquitous phenomenon

- Doesn't support sending HTML email, which is fine until your coworkers wonder why your mails always look funky and replies lose formatting

- I'm faster in Betterbird[1] than I am in mutt. Turns out drag-and-dropping mails into folders is pretty fast.

- Configuring an even halfway decent set-up takes ages, Betterbird just works out of the box

- Mutt relies on mbsync[3] or offlineimap[4], these tools don't support OAuth well. Betterbird supports it out of the box. (You can run without them, if you're willing to put up with bad buggy behavior in GMail where when messages are moved into folders they are only copied, the original message stays put in the original folder while a new message is copied into the other.)

- With shift+click, Betterbird allows the user to reply or compose using plain text just fine when the need arises

Sorry guys. I absolutely live in the terminal, but enough's enough. I'm out.

I do like using newsboat as an RSS reader though, that investment panned out so far.

1: https://www.betterbird.eu/

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39812124

3: https://isync.sourceforge.io/mbsync.html

4: https://www.offlineimap.org/

Aerc:

Could probably be built on Windows. You just need Go and make. Betterbird supports MacOS only since a view weeks. My initial suggestions to build it for Mac was denied by the author because of „money“.

Let’s you view html emails. It’s in the article.

I bet moving mails by keystrokes are much faster than drag and drop per mouse. If you use the same folders again and again it even faster. Eg:

  pa = :archive flat<Enter> # move (think put or paste) mail in the archive folder
  pb = :move<space> Brain<Enter> # move mail in my Brain.
  pf = :move<space> # move (think put or paste) mail in folder. Next character filters folders.

works out of the box. Configuration is less complicated than mutt (by far)

Works fine with OAUTH

BB is fine but I hate it that I can’t use my own keyboard shortcuts. A ubiquitous phenomenon.

All fair points. The second and third one can be mitigated by a, say, w3m mailcap entry respectively muttrc entry set send_multipart_alternative_filter=markdown2html.py [1]

[1] https://gitlab.com/muttmua/mutt/-/blob/master/contrib/markdo...

"Mutt/aerc doesn't support windows, an OS many use by preference or requirement"

All modern Windows boxes have Hyper-V built in to some extent and you can run a Linux VM. You have OpenSSH natively too. It will take a bit of twiddling to setup a suitable environment but not much.

I use Linux exclusively and prefer GUIs too. I use Evolution against MS Exchange on-prem, for my sins. I also run a set of vanity email domains for friends and family (Dovecot, Exim etc).

I'm not familiar with Betterbird but it is now bookmarked and noted for eval.

One day we are going to have to dump the Exchange box and I look forward to the discussion about what happens next. M365? Nope, or OK - you kids do that and I'll bugger off and do my own thing. Do bear in mind that I've been running the email system for 25+ years (it was GroupWise once) and I am the Managing Director!

In the end you really can replace Exchange with and IMAPD, MTA etc and a calendaring app of some sort.

Anyway, I'm strolling rather rapidly off topic. Sorry and thanks for the Betterbird notes.

Maybe dodo[1] is something for you. It is basically a graphical email client but with lots of vim-bindings.

Basically the best of both worlds, terminal and graphical. Like the qutebrowser[2] for emails.

However I think its kinda in a unmaintained state and only supports notmuch backend.

1: https://github.com/akissinger/dodo 2: https://qutebrowser.org/

qutebrowser author here, use Dodo and can confirm it's basically the qutebrowser of mail clients :)

Development is slow but not unmaintained. The author comes back every month or so to merge PRs. Reminds me I have a bunch of local changes I should upstream...

I stumbled upon Dodo while checking your starred repos, and I think it deserves more attention than it has; it is mature enough to be used by users who wants customizibility, vim-bindings, and easy configuration. It's one of my top options to migrate to as a mail client if I find any problems with neomutt, which I am using right now.

despite the questionable politics of the author, I use mutt-wizard, and using its configs, a simple "v" instead of "o" will open the mail in the open web-browser. I've found this more than acceptable for reading html mail.

I don't use it for work, only personal use, though, so ymmv.

Do you feel like you shouldn't use it because of the author's politics? It's not like he gains anything from you using it. Even if he gained money from it I don't think there's any reason to believe he'd use that money to further those political opinions.

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