
Why Some Security Experts Use Mutt - secfirstmd
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-security-experts-are-using-an-ancient-email-format-in-2015
======
tptacek
I don't know any security experts who do this. I do know a bunch of old-school
nerds who use mutt because that's what they got started with.

~~~
jvehent
I don't think people use mutt because of security (other than good PGP
support). I think people use mutt because they like the efficiency of a lean,
terminal based, email client.

~~~
dmix
That plus there aren't many good open source (non-web) options.

Thunderbird is pretty bad.

~~~
simoncion
What's wrong with Thunderbird? Note that if you use it as an IMAP client for
Gmail, that Gmail's IMAP implementation is -as I understand it- kinda bad, so
you're gonna kinda have a bad time.

~~~
ulrikrasmussen
I find that it hasn't really been designed for keyboard-only use. Some
features, such as switching folders for instance, seem to require a mouse, or
at least I haven't been able to find a shortcut for doing it. It's also kind
of hard to avoid accidentally composing html emails - it cannot be disabled
completely. I still use thunderbird myself though, as I haven't been able to
find a better alternative for Linux. claws-mail comes close, but it does too
much work in the ui thread, which grinds everything to a halt whenever it
fetches email. Why do mail clients all seem to suck so much, given how much
people use email?

~~~
mariusmg
To switch folders with the keyboard :

\- install Nostalgy addon

\- press "g"

\- type/select folder name

\- profit$

~~~
ulrikrasmussen
Perfect! That seems to fix the main issues I have with Thunderbird :). Thanks!

------
jbk
I still use mutt (and default to text), but I don't see anyone else doing
this, even in my geek coworkers or friends. So I'm a bit surprised by this
article.

I use mutt because it's very very fast, and quite customizable (I maintain a
kind of 0-inbox through a set of hotkeys, + spamassin + procmail). To handle
numerous mailing-lists with medium volume, it's so far the best I've seen.

I tried many email clients (on Windows, OSX and Linux), but I always come back
to mutt, because it's the fastest to handle the high-volume of email I have...

~~~
heipei
I've been using mutt exlusively for many years, and I got a fair amount of
flack for it every now and then. While I like to believe that it's more secure
than any full-featured bloated mail-client (hello Thunderbird), my reason for
using mutt is simpler. I like the speed, efficiency and customization aspects
of mutts, plus being able to use vim to compose my mails. Quite frankly, I
don't get how people rave about text editors but then fail to include them in
their mail workflow, which is where people spend quite a bit of time nowadays.

The other reason I like mutt is because it still conforms to the UNIX
principle: One thing and one thing well. True, you could use mutt for
SMTP/IMAP, but there are better tools for that. I use mutt with offlineimap,
msmtp and mu (for searching).

------
dogma1138
Most "Security Experts" are working for consultancy, tech firms, and
government agencies so they probably use plenty of other clients. The majority
will probably run Outlook since Exchange is the defacto mail-server standard
for any organization (that isn't tied to Lotus because 45 years ago the CEO
had to sacrifice a goat to appease IBM to spare his 1st born), the rest will
probably use Gmail or any other web-based mail that their smaller company is
using. Most "experts" don't necessarily follow their own advice just as
alcohol, drug use and smoking is more common in Doctors than any other diploma
based profession out there, so can security "experts" run just as much as a
shitty setup as everyone else and think that slightly better common sense and
opsec will keep them safe which more often than not it would.

~~~
totony
You can use mutt with Exchange servers and Gmail servers

~~~
hibbelig
Mutt and Exchange? Bliss! Would you happen to have a doc link handy?

~~~
totony
Mutt doesn't support retrieving mail very well, but you can use sync programs
(getmail, offlineimap, isync, exchange2mbox) to create local mailboxes and
make mutt use the local mailbox directory instead.

you can send email using external programs (local smtp server and openxchange
for exchange).

Mutt is not a traditional mail client, it is more of a glue between multiple
programs so you can have one interface for all of your emails need.

~~~
kragen
If Mutt is not a _traditional mail client_ , then what is? heirloom-mailx?

I read my mail with less. _That 's_ a nontraditional mail client.

~~~
keithpeter
_" I read my mail with less."_

How? Sounds like you just grep your way through the mailbox?

~~~
kragen
Yes.

------
therealmarv
Security Experts... let me quote Linus Torvalds: "the security community tends
to be very black and white. Either it's security or it's not. And if it is
security, they care deeply. And if it is not, they don't care."

So who cares if you write your email in text mode but browse the web with
Chrome/Firefox? No offense against Mutt... I can understand that some terminal
pros like it but I cannot understand using it for security sake. So what
happens if you want to view a html email? What about mail on a mobile phone (I
guess security experts do not use them)?

And mutt has other attack surface because it is using the terminal. Look here
for a Ubuntu security notice about mutt:
[http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-2440-1/](http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-2440-1/)
Now I smile because gmail is not affected by that!

This is all not practical for 99,9% of normal users out there.

If you care about security do not let the paranoia control you. We need to
improve security for the normal users out there. Just my opinion.

~~~
toothbrush
I used to use mutt (now i use mu4e) and indeed i do not own a mobile phone
capable of more than GSM. Also, as mentioned elsewhere, HTML rendering works
fine in mutt and mu4e (although perhaps this opens me up to various nefarious
things).

I don't do this because i'm a security expert (i'm not), i just love speed (so
AJAX and fancypants websites are out for me, i'll use the terminal or Emacs
where possible) and the keyboard.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and i'd never trust my web browser with my PGP key...

~~~
dmd
> i just love speed (so AJAX and fancypants websites are out for me, i'll use
> the terminal or Emacs where possible) and the keyboard.

The trouble is that most people who say this end up doing 6 things that take
200 ms each (with the keyboard) instead of 1 thing that takes 1 second (with
the mouse), and feel like they're zooming along in hyperspace. You feel like a
leet hacker, but are you really getting anything done more efficiently?

~~~
toothbrush
> are you really getting anything done more efficiently?

Maybe not, but is that 200ms improvement when using the mouse really worth it
if i get all warm and fuzzy-feeling by being able to type something? :p
Intangible benefits, yo.

More seriously though, i also feel (personally -- maybe i'm an outlier) like
switching from keyboard to mouse and back is a bit of a performance hit, so i
tend to concentrate my workflow around the keyboard as much as possible. And
yeah, maybe (99% certainly!) i'm not the leetest or fastest h4x0r out there,
but at least i'm enjoying myself :).

(i would be curious about an actual test case though -- maybe someone could
design a few common tasks to complete using one's favourite HID and compare!)

------
michaelsbradley
I use mu4e[1] to read, search and refile my emails, and there's a keyboard
shortcut for viewing an HTML email in a browser. offlineimap[2] handles
inbound messages. I love it!

But for writing email, I still tend to jump over to Apple Mail. msmtp[3]
handles outbound messages on those occasions when I choose to fire off a
message from within mu4e.

[1]
[http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html](http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html)

[&] [https://github.com/djcb/mu](https://github.com/djcb/mu)

[2]
[https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap](https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap)

[3] [http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/](http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/)

~~~
toothbrush
I also use mu4e, and i'm curious, why do you switch to Mail.app for composing?
I love the fact that all my editor customisations (of which there are many)
are still there when i'm writing email.

~~~
deong
To each their own, obviously, but this does seem profoundly weird. I can't
imagine anyone choosing an Emacs-based mua and not using the editing ability
for composing mail.

~~~
michaelsbradley
I've been using Apple Mail since the OS X Public Beta in 2000. Its address
completion and rich text support are entwined in how I think about authoring
emails, so I'm simply more comfortable using it for that purpose. It also
helps that Emacs-style movement keys work throughout OS X, including Apple
Mail's "new message" windows.

I did give mu4e a go, i.e. for writing emails, and I never got to a point
where it really appealed to me. I do love it, though, for reading and managing
my tens of thousands of email messages. It's also nice that I can easily
create links to messages in mu4e, which I can include in my org-mode files.

------
gooseyard
I've used mutt for ages, but a couple of years ago I switched to Karel Zak's
mutt-kz branch ([https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-
kz](https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz)), which integrates notmuch into mutt.
The setup is a little fussy (although well documented), but the results are
spectacular. Mutt's search was never horrible but with notmuch its nutty fast,
and the tagging feature makes dealing with search and mailing lists very
convenient.

~~~
pilooch
You can use mairix as a search system outside of mutt. Results are a temporary
mailbox.

~~~
danieldk
notmuch can generate temporary maildirs as well with this script:

[http://git.notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch/blob_plain/HEAD:/cont...](http://git.notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch/blob_plain/HEAD:/contrib/notmuch-
mutt/notmuch-mutt)

However, in my experience mutt-kz is much faster. Plus, you get tagging
everywhere (if you use it) and threads can be reconstructed across folders
(helpful when your own mails are in a 'Sent' folder).

------
0XAFFE
As I'm a emacs person, I tried once wanderlust[1] and got hooked up to it.
Wanderlust is mail client which supports a wide variety of protocols. For me
the biggest advantages are the blazing fast IMAP support and the whole emacs
thing (Keybindings, Help (C-h b for all keybindings in this buffer, priceless
I have to say), the possibility to run it either in GUI or in a terminal,
etc). Recently the devs uploaded it to melpa[2] which makes it even more easy
to get started. I would definitly recommend it, to people who are already
using emacs, its such a joy!

[1]
[https://github.com/wanderlust/wanderlust](https://github.com/wanderlust/wanderlust)

[2] [http://melpa.org/#/wanderlust](http://melpa.org/#/wanderlust)

~~~
rekado
Another Emacs person here. I'm using offlineimap+msmtp together with mu4e. I
prefer not to do IMAP sync or mail delivery in Emacs itself.

~~~
nextos
Have you tried isync? I was using offlineimap before, but found it buggy and
inefficient.

~~~
hiq
What are the bugs you are referring to? I have been using it for a few weeks
for a couple of mail accounts without trouble so far. It could probably be
faster though (customizing 'maxconnections' does help).

~~~
deong
It never reliably functioned as a daemon for me. It would just stop checking
for messages randomly after an hour or two. And if you give up on it being a
daemon, then it's horrifically slow because it's doing full syncs all the
time.

I ended up having a script running out of cron that would kill and restart the
daemon process every 30 minutes so that I could get reasonably fast
incrememntal updates but still have it continue to work properly.

And then it started losing track of what the server looks like. If you delete
a label on the Gmail side, then of course offlineimap wants to recreate it.
For a little while, it was tolerable to stop offlineimap, delete all the local
metadata for a folder, go delete the folder from Gmail, and then restart
offlineimap, but eventually that stopped working too, and it was recreating
deleted folders on the server that I never managed to find a reason for.

isync just worked exactly how I wanted to after spending a bit of time setting
it up, and it's been pretty solid since then.

------
mfincham
There are several slightly less hardcore alternatives to Mutt for those
wanting a more modern e-mail experience without the security baggage of
running an entire browser. Sylpheed for instance is a very pleasant text-only
MUA ([http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/](http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/)). For
added peace of mind it does not take long to write an AppArmor profile to
further confine Sylpheed to just the parts of your filesystem you'd like it to
be able to access.

~~~
kjs3
_For added peace of mind it does not take long to write an AppArmor profile to
further confine Sylpheed to just the parts of your filesystem you 'd like it
to be able to access._

Do you have an example? Sounds like a pretty awesome setup that you should
share.

~~~
mfincham
I will see if I can get it tidied up enough I'd be comfortable sharing :)

------
hackuser
Thunderbird has, or had, a plain text mode and a "Simple HTML" mode (other
than only recognizing a subset of HTML, I don't know what it does) for
displaying messages. You can leave it in plain text mode and, in the event you
really need to view HTML, switch it to "Simple" or full HTML. It also can
block remote images and, I think, all JavaScript.

The wonderful Nostalgy add-on provides a very responsive keyboard interface.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/thunderbird/addon/nostalgy/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/thunderbird/addon/nostalgy/)

I don't know if current Thunderbird versions include all that, however.

~~~
JohnTHaller
I use Thunderbird and keep it set as text only for sending and remote images
loading is disabled by default (as it should be). JavaScript in emails is not
loaded or run.

~~~
hackuser
Thanks.

> I use Thunderbird and keep it set as text only for sending

Is that an option for viewing messages? That's where the security risk mostly
exists.

~~~
JohnTHaller
View - Message Body As - and then your options are Original HTML, Simple HTML,
and plaintext.

Loading of external images is fully disabled by default. You can enable it
per-email by clicking as well as per-sender (which I don't personally do or
recommend).

Showing as text is mostly unnecessary, though, as Thunderbird does not allow
Javascript or any plugins within messages. As a result, the attack surface is
_significantly_ reduced compared to a browser as most browser-based attacks
are via Flash, PDF, Java, Javascript, etc in decreasing order of popularity.
That wipes out the vulnerabilities used in the vast majority of attacks right
off the bat. Thunderbird uses the Gecko engine underneath which is up to date
and version tied to Firefox ESR, so the engine gets security updates basically
same-day as Firefox itself, which is another big point in its favor.

------
methehack
I'm not sure I buy the reasoning on "surface area", at least not the specific
comparisons in the article. It seems unfair to count Chrome but not Unix. For
that matter, shouldn't we count the surface area of everything that touches
the email as it hops around, including routers, etc? And isn't that the whole
problem with email that the protocol does not require secure transport? So,
seems like the only way to make that even vaguely secure is to use PGP (or
something) on top, in which case who cares about mutt...

~~~
mike_hearn
Right.

"Let's switch from an email client written in a safe high level language
that's also running inside multiple sandboxes and which has a full time
security team (e.g. gmail) to ...... a mail client written in C"

Doesn't seem like a great approach.

~~~
sahara
(Preemptive N.B.—I'm far from an expert, but I'm very interested in seeing
this aspect of the topic discussed further by folks who might be experts.)

Isn't the general premise here that one can choose to package up any program
in as many deeply nested (virtual or physical) sandboxes as one would like,
but there's an inherent benefit to the piece of software inside all those
boxes exposing to one's adversary as few avenues as possible to attempt to
escape them (specifically as it pertains to people in the business of painting
targets on their backs e.g. Soghoian)?

Put another way, of course Gmail and Chrome have dedicated security teams, but
they won't ever have _prevent $GIVEN_INFOSEC_RESEARCHER 's box from getting
owned_ teams.

------
lottin
Another reason is that it spawns a text editor. Typing emails in a text widget
without proper editing capabilities can be irritating.

~~~
icebraining
In Firefox, you can use It's All Text! to edit the current text area in a
proper editor.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/its-all-
text/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/its-all-text/)

~~~
grayclhn
That works less and less as more websites offer "improved" text editing
capabilities through javascript.

------
yeukhon
The title carries sarcasm as soon as you finish the article half-way.

I totally agree that usability is damn important. One reason I stopped using
Ubuntu Desktop version is exactly the poor usability of Unity, and I now
prefer headless (and if I ever need browser I'd use X-windows).

For email client I either use Thunderbird, or Outlook 2013, simply because
graphical interface is easier to work with. I code using VIM and I do a lot of
work from terminal, but I can't image myself learning all the tricks like
dragging image, setting up a meeting, viewing people's availability the next
day all via terminal screen. Doable but I still think graphical interface has
advantage. The thing I dislike about email clients like Outlook is their
WYSIWYG editor as sometimes the editor is limited, or too aggressive. But
since my job involves a lot of communication, I do need the convenience of
WYSIWYG and COPY-PASTE. What a struggle.

~~~
thanksgiving
I'd prefer things that need formatting be an attachment such as rtf or pdf
leaving the email in plain text. There is no reason why personally written
email needs rich text.

~~~
bigger_cheese
I use outlook at my work for email and its not uncommon to send screenshots
and similar.

A common workflow for me is to hit print screen paste into the message compose
window, crop the image and super impose annotations onto it using the office
drawing tools (circle, arrows, text box etc).

I also like the integration with Communicator and calendar, Having
notification about when people are online in meetings and which building they
are in (my work has multiple sites) is handy. I don't usually like Microsoft
products but Outlook is pretty solid in my opinion. The only alternative I've
really seen is Lotus Notes.

~~~
mappu
Does that really crop the image, or just hide parts of it? I ask because
cropping in Word can be undone by another recipient.

------
aidenn0
Claws (and sylpheed, which it is a fork of) is by default text-only (html
rendering only through a plugin). I used to use just mutt, but use claws quite
a bit now.

~~~
nickpsecurity
My graphical client of choice. Lightweight, quick, and relatively easy to box
in. Didn't play with Gmail so nicely so I access it a different way. Works
with other accounts fine.

------
morganvachon
I don't use _mutt_ anymore, but I still feel it's a beautiful client, both in
its simplicity and its appearance (take the screenshot from the article, for
example). I probably should start using it again since I'm transitioning away
from Gmail to a traditional mail host.

~~~
icebraining
I use Alpine instead; tried mutt first, but found it abstruse to set up.

~~~
raverbashing
Yeah, I'm biased towards (Al)pine, would be interesting to know how does Mutt
compares with it

~~~
eru
I started with Pine, and used mutt for a bit later. Mutt is ok, if you invest
the time in learning it. (If you can handle vim, you can cope with mutt.)

~~~
twic
Interesting. I've been using (al)pine for years, and there are bits of it
which really frustrate me - mostly how slow it is when dealing with large
mailboxes - so i have been considering a move to mutt for a while. I'm not a
vim fan, so i might have to reconsider!

~~~
eru
Oh, the specific keystrokes etc are not the same. (I don't think they even
have the concept of modes in mutt.)

It's more of a spiritual similarity. About as faint as vim / nethack.

------
kkapelon
The sup email client is another good option. Text mode like mutt but threads
emails like gmail [http://supmua.org/](http://supmua.org/)

------
koevet
I do use mutt as my principal e-mail client. It started as an experiment, now
I fully transitioned to it. I enjoy being able to compose messages in vim and
the tight integration with gpg. In case you want to try mutt out, some time
ago I wrote a short guide about setting up mutt on osx,

[http://www.lucianofiandesio.com/getting-started-with-mutt-
on...](http://www.lucianofiandesio.com/getting-started-with-mutt-on-osx)

------
bakul
I still use mh (well, nmh now) programs for my personal email. There is
nothing that beats mh's "pick" program for selecting emails.

~~~
a3n
Does imap figure anywhere in your mix?

~~~
bakul
Nope! I forward mail from various other email addresses to my email address
where I care.

------
jakeogh
I like alot: [https://github.com/pazz/alot](https://github.com/pazz/alot)

------
massysett
I used to use Mutt, but these days I do over 75% of my mail reading on a
phone, and on a phone Mutt is a non-starter.

~~~
schoen
I have used it from a phone with a terminal emulator over ssh (all of my
phones have had keyboards). It was impressive to see how the keyboard
supported mapping swipe gestures to cursor movement keys so that I could swipe
up and down in my mutt message listings.

~~~
kragen
What's the best QWERTY-keyboard phone now?

~~~
luxpir
You would have to use an ancient modem or just sync emails by serial
cable/irda, but the Psion 5MX was about the pinnacle of portable content
creation hardware, IMO. With it you can write emails or whole books if you
wish. Some prefer the 3 series, but not necessarily for the keyboard. 25-40hr
battery life on 2 AAs, insta-on operation, CF card transfer of files - no
wonder people are still using them.

Now that people are not as fixated on having colour screens, being primed to
now accept e-ink style displays, is there a chance we could get a similar
device with more modern specs? I think I'd _still_ rather work from a palmtop
than a laptop or phone when not at a 'workstation'.

I used an N900 for a long time (relatively speaking) and found its keyboard to
be solid, but not in a way that could make writing or emailing tasks more
productive.

~~~
kragen
It does look pretty awesome, but I can't find anybody selling Psions here in
Buenos Aires, and it seems like they might lack something in the camera, GPS,
3-D modeling, and audio department. Like, I recorded a beatboxer at a public
gathering today on my Android phone, and more than once I've sketched things
on paper and photographed them with it, quite aside from other creative uses
for photography.

------
lloydde
> A quarter of a century ago, checking your email meant logging onto a
> mainframe

The lead in seems incorrect. Pine wasn't publicly released until 1992. By the
early 90s many college and university environments were thin clients or unix
workstations connecting to unix servers.

------
skepticaluchiha
Popular mail clients such as Thunderbird and Outlook are underattack so the
"Security experts" use lesser known clients. I do believe GPG should have been
mentioned more besides the Enigmail mention since we are talking about
security.

------
mrbill
I've used mutt since '98 or so, and see no reason to change. For HTML email I
can either pipe it into lynx or bounce it to Gmail.

------
sanatgersappa
Wish it was more user friendly and ran well on Windows (yes, I'm that guy). A
good example of something that is user friendly, fast, secure and runs almost
everywhere is the messaging client Telegram. Would be great if there were more
programs like it.

~~~
simoncion
> Wish [mutt] was more user friendly and ran well on Windows...

I would be _shocked_ if Cygwin's mutt port didn't run just as well on Windows
as it did on Linux. Remember that UNIX software that you compile with Cygwin
becomes a native Windows executable.

~~~
mappu
Software you compile with Cygwin's GCC becomes a native Cygwin executable,
with its own concepts of paths, processes, symlinks and environment. All
binaries compiled with Cygwin always inherit GPL virality. The Cygwin OS is
coincidentally hosted on Windows and mostly plays nice with it.

Software you compile with Mingw(-w64)'s GCC becomes a native Windows
executable.

~~~
simoncion
AFAICT, Unix software that you compile with Cygwin's tools understands both
Unix paths and Windows style paths. [0]

It also understands Windows environment variables. [1]

Cygwin is aware of Windows processes. [2]

Cygwin is aware of the Windows registry. [3]

The executables that are created by the default Cygwin build process are PE
executables that have a dependency on the Cygwin DLLs and run on any Windows
system. They _are_ native Windows software, with a dependency on a third-party
DLL.

If you build open-source software against the Cygwin libraries, that software
can be distributed under its _original_ license. If you modify the Cygwin
build process to produce executables that do _not_ depend on the Cygwin
libraries, then you can distribute that software under any licence you like.
Regardless, if you have cash you can _always_ reach alternative licensing
terms if you reach out to Red Hat. [4]

Cygwin symlinks don't make use of NTFS junction points, but I imagine that
that is for two reasons:

1) Cygwin _might_ be run on a FAT32 system.

2) There are many, many, many pieces of Windows software (some of it is big
name software!) out there that blow up _spectacularly_ when they encounter a
Junction Point. (Indeed, it was my direct experience that Windows Explorer
behaved very poorly when asked to recursively delete a folder containing a
couple of Junction Points in -I think- pre-SP1 Windows 7. I haven't tried JPs
in _AGES_ , so I can't speak to whether or not MSFTs own tooling has gotten
better.)

At a _minimum_ , software compiled against Cygwin meets the most basic
definition of Windows software (A PE executable that runs on Windows systems).
I hope that I have made it clear that the Cygwin libraries _also_ provide a
_large_ amount of interoperability between Unix software and software
originally written for Windows.

[0] Try it out. Fire up a Cygwin Bash shell and do the following (assuming
that you're running on an English-language Windows):

echo "hello there" > "$USERPROFILE\Desktop\helloThere.txt"

then check the new file on your desktop. rm works just fine, too. Forward
slashes work in paths, also!

[1] Try this out in a Cygwin bash shell:

echo $APPDATA ; echo $LOCALAPPDATA ; echo $SYSTEMROOT

[2] Again, in a cygwin bash shell do:

ps -W

[3] Do (in a Cygwin bash shell):

ls /proc/registry/

[4] [https://cygwin.com/licensing.html](https://cygwin.com/licensing.html)

------
J_Darnley
Reminds me on the inverse question I replied to from a few weeks ago: "Ask HN:
Someone still using Thunderbird for Gmail in 2015?"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10026641](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10026641)

To be honest, I never thought about the possible weakness of the html
rendering in most clients. But then I am more concerned about my privacy than
security.

~~~
0x0
How can you have pricacy without security?

------
leephillips
I use mutt because after you learn of its power, other mail clients reveal
themselves to be toys. I keep all my active correspondence in my inbox (5773
messages at the moment). With a few keystrokes I can instantly create a subset
of my inbox optimized for the task at hand. (People who use toys instead of
mutt often advocate an "inbox zero" approach, I understand.)

~~~
eru
You can do the same two things with gmail.

(There are lots of things mutt does that gmail doesn't, of course.)

~~~
leephillips
What two things?

I'm not an expert on Gmail's keyboard interface. How, for example, can I see
all the messages from Joe Zwanizol that are more than 15 days but less than 60
days old, using only the keyboard, in five seconds?

~~~
eru
> What two things?

The two things mentioned: quickly-customized inboxes (via search) and handling
lots of emails.

> How, for example, can I see all the messages from Joe Zwanizol that are more
> than 15 days but less than 60 days old, using only the keyboard, in five
> seconds?

There's a search syntax for that. Not sure whether you'll type it out in five
seconds.

A browser extension to bring mutt keyboard interface to gmail might be useful
for some folk.

~~~
leephillips
After looking for it I found the search syntax, so it would seem that
something like this is possible, as you say. But it's not as expressive as
mutt's pattern language, so would be clunkier to use. But it is there.

