

The Homely Mutt - dcope
http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/

======
stevelosh
My dotfiles are online if anyone wants to take a look at the actual
configuration I use:

<https://bitbucket.org/sjl/dotfiles/>

<https://github.com/sjl/dotfiles>

~~~
sophacles
Good post, thanks!

Do you (or anyone else reading this for that matter) have any insight on how
gmail -> imap works with labels when a single message has multiple labels? For
example an email may be tagged with "clients" "$JOBNAME" and "receipt". Does
it put multiple copies of the message in the local cache, or does it do a hard
link, or ...?

~~~
chimeracoder
Gmail's IMAP is unfortunately broken; they implement labels as folders, not
tags. This means that the same message in "All Mail", "Inbox", and
"Notifications" are three different messages that happen to have the exact
same content and _almost_ identical headers/metadata.

So, by default, you're going to be storing multiple copies of each message.
It's not a difficult task to use hardlinks instead if you want, but mutt can't
make this judgement by itself, because not all of the metadata is identical,
and mutt is designed for the general case, not specifically for Gmail.

Note that this is a Gmail issue, not strictly a mutt issue; other IMAP
providers don't all have this awkward behavior.

------
rbellio
"Mutt certainly isn’t the prettiest email client around, and its
setup/configuration process is one of the ugliest out there. But once you get
it set up it’s got a lot of advantages over many other email clients."

Stopped reading, right there. Why are we still fighting with things that are
difficult/ugly to setup/configure? Could have been the best tool ever written,
but if I have to spend a half a day figuring it out, and there are other tools
that do it better, I'm out.

~~~
ajross
"We" (meaning not you, apparently) are still doing that kind of thing because
we know we'll spend _thousands_ of days using the tool, so a few hours spend
leaning it seems like a bargain. I could just as easily ask why "we" (meaning
you) are still getting confused between "discoverability" and "usability"
after decades of silly arguments like this.

Don't use mutt, that's fine. But come up with some better justifications. (
_edit for full disclosure: I don't use mutt either, having to deal
professionally with enough unreadable-in-plain-text mail that it makes more
sense for me to do everything in Thunderbird._ )

~~~
rbellio
I put time in when I feel like the tool may solve an issue or problem I have
and when I think there will be a ROI for the time I spend doing it.

This seems like a pretty reasonable justification to me. Having spent a lot of
time authoring emails in different tools, I'm comfortable with what I have. If
what I have does what I want and the other tool that people are telling me is
better has a disclaimer like the above, then what exactly am I doing wrong?

I'm all for trying out new tools and I spend hours doing so every week. I have
to pick and choose what it is that I utilize. I wasn't arguing that the tool
might not be valuable for some folks, just that it did a very good job of un-
selling me, very quickly.

------
gurraman
The weekend has _just_ passed and you submit this on a Monday? Really? Now I'm
going to wake up tomorrow, heavy with sleep after spending the wee hours
tweaking my configuration and trying out "contacts", "offlineemap", and the
sidebar patch (that I thought I didn't want).

Thank goodness I already have mutt installed and configured (almost) to my
liking.

------
endgame
This is exactly the sort of article I want to see on HN. It's thorough, and
instead of dropping a pile of dotfiles on github and saying "here you go",
Steve goes through everything and explains what's what and why.

~~~
huskyr
"Coming Home to Vim" is a pretty good post too from Steve:

<http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/>

~~~
zarify
That's just awesome. My vim just got a hell of a lot better just from reading
that (which probably tells you something about the level I've been operating
at for the last 15 years or so).

------
pwthornton
Sparrow is still getting small updates on both iOS and OS X. Mutt hasn't been
updated in a few years. I'm not sure one is more dead than the other.

Also, one app became loved because it has a really innovative UI and the other
is an app that eschews a modern UI. I'm not sure many people will logically
make the leap from Sparrow to Mutt. More likely, people will gravitate back to
to gmail.com, which should be getting a lot of improvements from the Sparrow
team in the future.

~~~
stevelosh
> Mutt hasn't been updated in a few years

<http://dev.mutt.org/hg/mutt/> says two months.

------
gyepi
Rather than using your gmail password with offlinemap, albeit protected by
keychain, I suggest creating an application specific password for offlinemap.
See
[http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=1858...](http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=185833).
This is actually required if you switch to two factor authentication and still
want various apps to access your google data.

------
soldermont001
It would be great if someone could write good text email client. I recently
tried some old ones I used in the 90s again, and the quality of software has
improved a lot since then.

Mutt:

\- gets SSL errors with MS Exchange (gnu bug?), doesn't retry the connection
and then stops displaying all your email.

\- could never get html to text rendering working, almost all emails blank

\- gave up on mutt...

Alpine:

\- did actually covert html emails to text fine, most emails are readable

\- no key rebindins (sic), I have ^T bound to new-window in tmux, too bad
that's the _only_ way to run spell check in alpine is to press ^T

\- lose connection to IMAP server causes already downloaded mail to no longer
be displayed on the screen

\- quirky LDAP lookups, I can't type peoples full names, only their login
names, then it resolves them fine

\- tried to put my IMAP folder first on the list in the config file to make it
faster to get to my inbox, crash

\- tried to have it startup in my inbox using the startup key sequence, crash

\- if there's one letter in my drafts folder, it asks me every time if I wan't
to continue it when I compose a new message

\- asks me every time if I want to reply to everyone, and if I say yes, it
includes me(!?) so I get a dup email

\- has pine's legendary inconstant key bindings (or is that a feature?)

\- sending a message hangs the whole client until it's been sent

\- no real concept of a deleted folder, just puts a D next to it and leaves it
displayed on your screen, so you have to expunge manually if you don't want it
to clutter your screen

\- all in all, alpine is usable though, but there's plenty annoying things in
it we used to think were normal back when pine was popular.

~~~
adiM
I have been using Alpine/Pine for almost 13 years, and agree with most of your
concerns. However, some of these can be controlled using the settings.

\- Full name search in LDAP work correctly. Have you set name, surname, and
given name attributes correctly in your LDAP setup.

\- I exclusively used IMAP and have had no troubles with IMAP folder being
fist in the list.

\- Starting in the inbox (using key sequences) has always worked for me.

\- Reply all does not include me in the Cc. Have you tried setting up
alternate addresses field in the settings.

For HTML emails, I have set w3m as my html viewer. w3m works better with
complex layouts in html.

~~~
soldermont001
\- LDAP: it's a corp AD server, cn, name and sn are all set correctly from
what I can tell.

\- Maybe CentOS 6.3 ships with a bad build or lib that causes it to crash. I'm
using alpine-2.02-3.el6.x86_64.

\- Setting the alternate address fixed the replying to myself issue, thanks!

\- I'll give w2m a shot too. ;-)

EDIT: I suspect the crashes when going into the mailbox are due to it
requiring me to enter a password.

------
djcb
I wrote an emacs-based e-mail client "mu4e"; see e.g. [http://emacs-
fu.blogspot.fi/2012/08/introducing-mu4e-for-ema...](http://emacs-
fu.blogspot.fi/2012/08/introducing-mu4e-for-email.html)

Its user-interface is a bit mutt-influenced, but it's fully query-based and
very fast, and of course you can extend it using elisp. A fairly young
project, but it's near-fully documented, and the manual has instructions on
how to set things up with Gmail.

~~~
philjackson
I'm going to dive in here and give a huge thumbs up to mu4e. I spent a chunk
of time with Gnus and Wanderlust and both feel so much slower. I can't make
the switch yet because I'm too lazy to research how to get the multiple
mailbox/index configuration I have with mutt (if it's possible?) but hopefully
will soon.

Really appreciate the work, djcb.

~~~
djcb
There can be only one database (index) per mu4e/emacs instance, but you can
store multiple maildirs in one database though, and there's support for
multiple accounts (esp. in the upcoming 0.99; there are some recent ML-threads
about this).

------
danieldk
If you don't want to store your mail locally, but want nice search
functionality, for Google Mail users there's this patch:

[http://people.spodhuis.org/phil.pennock/software/mutt-
patche...](http://people.spodhuis.org/phil.pennock/software/mutt-
patches/patch-mutt-gmailcustomsearch.v1)

It'll do search server-side, which means that you have Google's full text
search without storing mail locally.

------
mpd
I switched back to Mutt a few months ago after trying Mail.app (filtering
wasn't up to my requirements, would hang often) and Thunderbird (bloated and
slow under load). It's been a champion.

urlview.sh is pretty awful, mis-parsing urls constantly for me. I then
discovered extract_url.pl[1], which is much, much better.

offlineimap likes to hang randomly - mail just stops coming in and the process
never stops, requiring me to remove the lockfile by hand, then kill the
process. I haven't found a replacement for it, unfortunately. Definitely open
to suggestions on this front.

The linked view_attachment.sh file has problems, for example, with files with
multiple dots in the filename (among others). I have made a few tweaks[2] to
it to make it more robust. It still has a few issues, but I've found it to
work better for the most part.

msmtp is probably unnecessary nowadays if you have a typical setup. For GMail,
add the lines:

    
    
      set smtp_url            = smtp://your@email.com@smtp.gmail.com:587/
      set smtp_pass           = mah_password
    

to .muttrc and you should be ready to go.

I also wrote a very small, crappy applescript launcher to launch an iTerm with
mutt from the OSX dock[3]. It won't open a second copy if already running, but
I haven't been able to figure out how to display a badge on the dock to denote
unread mail. It may not be possible.

[1] <http://www.memoryhole.net/~kyle/extract_url/>

[2]
[https://github.com/xxx/dotfiles/blob/master/osx/mailcap/view...](https://github.com/xxx/dotfiles/blob/master/osx/mailcap/view_attachment.sh)

[3] [https://github.com/xxx/dotfiles/blob/master/osx/mutt/mutt-
it...](https://github.com/xxx/dotfiles/blob/master/osx/mutt/mutt-iterm.scpt)

~~~
brandur
I had the same problems with Offlineimap while running it as a long-lived
background process, and wasn't able to find any clean way to resolve them.

Nowadays I have a cron script that kills any existing Offlineimap processes,
and allows a new one to run through once. Works perfectly.

------
andrewcooke
for those on linux, here's a simple .mailcap that i use:

    
    
        text/html; w3m -M -T text/html %s
        image/*; feh -F %s
        application/pdf; okular %s
        application/msword; oowriter %s
    

(i also use procmail, with procmail-lib, to filter into monthly mailboxes, and
the wonderful mairix <http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/> to provide
fast search. in fact, for me, mairix is the most important part of all this if
you want useful, fast email - but i haven't used notmuch so can't compare)

------
dsr_
I use maildir-utils instead of notmuch as an indexer; notmuch had odd failure
modes for me that weren't worth trying to debug.

mutt can also use IMAP/SSL directly, and I do that for some accounts, where I
don't want to have local storage.

~~~
telemachos
I second the suggestion of maildir-utils/mu[1].

Here's my setup for that, in case anyone is interested:
<https://gist.github.com/45e318c68eb5a52e1646>. It's essentially a cronjob
(LaunchAgent on OSX) that calls a shell script to update the index
periodically, plus a few macros to make searching from within mutt easier. To
use this, you'll need to create a "Search" folder for maildir-utils to store
results in.

[1] <http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/>

------
languagehacker
The day I need to make this sort of power-over-interface trade-off for reading
email is the day I stop using email.

------
overshard
This is a great post about a very finely tuned Mutt setup. I always enjoy
reading about high customized environments. I am someone who would love to use
Mutt but I get so much HTML only email it's sadly impossible for me to do so.
(Newsletters and misc friends who think large HTML footers are cool.)

~~~
dsr_
In your .muttrc:

auto_view text/html alternative_order text/plain text text/html

That presents plain text first if it's multiply-encoded, but makes html
available. In your mailcap:

text/html; /path/to/browser '%s'; description=HTML Text; test=test -n
"$DISPLAY"; nametemplate=%s.html

displays HTML in a browser window for you. mutt launches this when you choose
to look at the html version.

But instead, your mailcap could have this:

text/html; lynx -dump %s; copiousoutput; nametemplate=%s.html

which mutt interprets as "filter this through lynx and display it in the
terminal" which will solve 98% of your issues. It's fast, too.

~~~
overshard
I'll give lynx a try with this, I can't use a full browser as it would be on a
remote computer setup. Thanks for the tip!

------
callahad
I use a similar setup, but I've been bitten by having Mutt and OfflineIMAP
accessing the same Maildir concurrently. So instead, I run a local copy of
Dovecot to expose a local IMAP server that both Mutt and OfflineIMAP talk to
my Maildir through. This also means that I can trivially set up things like
Thunderbird or MacBiff, using the same local IMAP server. Rube Goldberg would
be proud.

~~~
antidoh
I do the same, run dovecot, for essentially the same reasons.

It's not Rube Goldberg, it's separation of concerns: dovecot/imap for message
serving and storage, and $CLIENT for mail access and processing.

Every so often I get pissed off at my mail client, run up the black flag and
start slitting mail client throats[1]. In fact this article started me off on
my biannual "doesn't _anything_ not suck" tour, this time looking at claws,
alpine and mutt. Anymore though, I just don't give a meh for intricate
configuration.

 _One_ thing would make me want to spend a day in feverish configuration: if
mh ("ah, mh") would do imap. I _loved_ mh back in the day, when there was
virtually _no_ interface, just a collection of command line programs.
Unfortunately it's pop-only and plain text only, far as I can tell. I have
this fantasy of finding the source and ...

[1] <http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/34585.html>

------
16s
I do almost exactly the same thing except I use getmail as my MRU and I have
it checking many different email accounts (gmail, work mail, other work mail,
etc). mutt is the best email client I've ever used. I like taking control of
my email, using my own paid-for smtp service (tuffmail) and in general not
relying on hosted email providers. procmail or maildrop are very handy too.

------
danso
I doubt I have the need to customize GMail to justify doing this amount of
work...but this was a very well put-together guide that goes beyond just "how-
to-replace-Sparrow" to showing the underpinnings of how e-mail works and the
thought process behind a hacked-together interface and service. I'm
bookmarking this as an example of a thoroughly useful and informative guide.
Thanks for making this.

~~~
keithpeter
Yes, very well written.

I do prefer offline e-mail and I actually use Claws under Linux, an X11 port
is available for Mac OS

Seems to provide similar functionality.

------
lysium
I love mutt! Unfortunately, I often write emails while looking at another one,
which I couldn't make work with mutt. Any ideas?

~~~
Smudge
You could use a terminal multiplexer (tmux, screen, etc) to just split-screen
your terminal.

~~~
tammer
Don't forget to launch any secondary instances of mutt with -R, or you'll
encounter conflicts.

I've been searching for the right way to launch the editor in a new tmux pane,
although apparently getting that to work smoothly would take a patching
effort.

~~~
frabcus
I launch innumerable copies of mutt without -R, and have never had any
conflicts.

Like the original poster, I'm using offlineimap and maildir's entirely.

What kind of conflicts do you get?

~~~
dredmorbius
Default / typical behavior is for mutt to update the mailbox message state
(new, unread, read, replied) when closing the mailbox. Using the -R flag
prevents this behavior.

Forgetting to do so is more an annoyance than an End of the World Event, but
it's an annoyance which can be avoided with a really simple flag use.

------
icebraining
Tried mutt, but I never really liked.

Nowadays I use 'Sup, but I might go (back) to Alpine, because its best feature
- the indexer - is also its major drawback, since it hits the disk pretty
heavily, which my VPS providers don't care for.

------
Dejital
I have spent hours and hours configuring my `mutt`, `offlineimap`,
`putmail.py`, but I have since grown disenchanted. In my experience,
`offlineimap` is annoyingly prone to crashing without any indication. Thus,
checking mail within `mutt` becomes unreliable. However, my favorite aspect of
`mutt` has been and remains being able to send e-mails very quickly and easily
through Terminal.

    
    
        echo "Hello World!" | mutt -s "Test E-mail" -a "file.txt" whomever@wherever.com
    

Therefore, I now use `mutt` exclusively for _sending_ mail and using Gmail.com
for reading and searching mail.

~~~
nvarsj
Worse than that, offlineimap can be plain destructive in the right
circumstances. I've had it arbitrarily delete thousands of messages due to the
local cache being in a strange state.

~~~
ChrisFrost
You might try a similar program, mbsync (<http://isync.sourceforge.net/>).
It's worked well for me during the past half-dozen years.

mbsync does not watch or poll for changes, but you can run mbsync in a loop
from your shell. Or, if you are running Linux on the mail server and client
and use Maildirs, you can run mbsync from mswatch
(<http://mswatch.sourceforge.net/>). (Disclaimer: I'm the author of mswatch.)

------
zafiro17
This was great. I'm a big fan of mutt. For all the advances in GUI software,
my favorites remain at the console: mutt, slrn, newsbeuter, links, and so on.

I wrote a guide to Mutt as well. It's geared for the less-tech inclined than
your typical ycombinator - but if you know any Linux/BSD noobs interested in
getting their feet wet, my Woodnotes guide will give them a gentler splashdown
than this advanced guide to setting up Mutt.
<http://therandymon.com/content/view/42/98/>

Well done, Steve - great work on this article.

------
Karunamon
There's one and only one reason that I haven't ever switched to a terminal
based email client.. HTML messages. I want to see images and formatted text,
not an unholy mess of tags and other detritus the program can't render.

As much as I like Alpine, being stuck on the terminal is a total deal breaker.
It's 2012 ferchrissakes - why are we using email tech that's stuck in the 80s?
Why does "modern" have to be at constant odds with "simple and functional"?

~~~
jvehent
MIME html emails will have a plain text part that will be displayed properly.
For pure HTML, you can always have mutt open them in a web browser.

~~~
Karunamon
A terminal still can't render images. Unless you're doing some level of
framebuffer shenanigans, that is, but I'd wager most people work on a GUI with
terminal windows, not full screen terminal VTYs.

We've got this wonderful invention called the graphical user interface.. why
not leverage it?

~~~
msbarnett
There's an unexamined assumption underlying your comments: Namely that because
something is terminal-based, it's 'not modern', and that the GUI unambiguously
represents progress on all fronts for all uses.

But consider: in the 30 odd years of GUI prevalence, there has never been an
example of a GUI email client as simple (for some value of simple),
functional, and powerful-for-power-users, as Mutt and Pine.

I think it's at least worth _considering_ the possibility that you're asking
for is the equivalent of wondering why you can't just have a lighter-than-air
balloon made out of lead; the possibility that GUIs might represent progress
along some axes (discoverability and approachability) while fundamentally
constraining you along others (power, functionality).

~~~
Karunamon
>But consider: in the 30 odd years of GUI prevalence, there has never been an
example of a GUI email client as simple (for some value of simple),
functional, and powerful-for-power-users, as Mutt and Pine.

That's exactly my point though - why do most email clients suck so bad? Slow
and bloated are the most common adjectives thrown around (Outlook,
Thunderbird), and if not that, then there's the weird UI's (Eudora, The Bat) -
and then there's the terminal clients, while very nice, very fast, very
functional, completely ignore all progress made in user interfaces over the
past 20 years. (Pine, Mutt)

It's like you have a choice: Modern, Fast, Functional. Pick any two.

This is something I can imagine coding . Give me something like Pine or Mutt
that works in a GUI and can render HTML and images, but still "looks" and runs
like Pine or Mutt. Imagine it in your head for a moment - the same UI, but
instead of html strewn about everywhere, you have actual rendering of html and
images (via choose-your-favorite engine, leaning towards Webkit) in the same
window.

I don't think that HTML rendering, speed, and functionality are mutually
exclusive goals.

~~~
adiM
I use alpine and have set w3m as the HTML reader in my mailcap file. w3m also
displays images in HTML. Alpine is able to display most HTML emails just fine,
but when it fails, I simply press V (which shows different mime parts of the
message) and Enter (by default the focus is on the 2nd part, which is
text/html; Enter launches the default html browser, which is w3m that displays
the message). This gives all the benefits of alpine, with the option to
display html+images in the same terminal if I need to.

------
rjzzleep
may i suggest mu <http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/> for indexing?

i use it with these macros

macro index <F8> "<shell-escape>mu find --clearlinks --format=links
--linksdir=~/Mail/search " \ "mu find"

macro index <F9> "<change-folder-readonly>~/Mail/search<return>" \ "mu find
results"

------
da_n
Great article and very timely for me, I just got Mutt working this weekend
with my Gmail account. Picture of setup (showing Spam folder).

<http://i.imgur.com/l4atq.jpg>

I haven't added all the features the author pointed out (like server-side
search) so excited to make it even better.

------
BCM43
I would also recommend people look into notmuch.

<http://notmuchmail.org/>

~~~
sigil
Tried notmuch a while back, ended up going back to mutt. If you're an emacs
user the notmuch mode may work well for you. The notmuch.vim plugin, OTOH,
leaves a lot to be desired.

More promising is this fork of mutt that adds notmuch support:

<https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz>

~~~
q_revert
"Notmuch is not much of an email program. It doesn't receive messages (no POP
or IMAP support). It doesn't send messages (no mail composer, no network code
at all)."

notmuch doesn't replace mutt, you use it with mutt/offlineimap etc as your
mail indexer, which makes _massive_ mail archives instantly searchable.. (and
does this extremely well)

I suspect this what the grandparent was referring to, it's not intended as a
mutt replacement, so to complain that it doesn't replace it well is a bit
unfair

------
ket
What are the advantages of using gmail as your server rather than, say,
installing your own postfix server on some linode?

~~~
nicksergeant
Gmail has largely solved the spam problem. Configuring spam filters and the
like is still a PITA with your own server.

~~~
dmortin
Yep, collabrorative filtering works very well. It's very rare I have spam in
my Gmail inbox.

------
anonymous_mouse
I would miss HTML formatted emails after a while.

A promising alternative is Muttator (<http://www.vimperator.org/muttator>).

Muttator is from the same team that made Vimperator, a Firefox add-on that
changed the way I browse the web.

~~~
leephillips
Muttils[1] makes it easier to deal with html email in mutt, and has a bunch of
other goodies as well. I hit one keystroke and I'm looking at the html message
in my web browser.

[1]<http://lee-phillips.org/muttheaven/>

------
fafner
I recommend mu (<http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/>) to search emails. It
can be integrated with mutt. But if you are an Emacs user then it even
provides a mail client (mu4e).

And you can write scripts for it in Guile.

------
dmmalam
Anyway to make mutt(or any cmd mail reader) use the Mail.app database, stored
in ~/Library/Mail? I already have Mail.app configured, and it has downloaded
all my gmails accounts into the plain text emlx format? Also have 10gb+ of
mail, and rather not have two copies of it.

------
kapowaz
> Now that Sparrow is effectively dead

Sparrow 1.6.4 was released on September 11, 2012. Mutt 1.5.21 was released on
September 15, 2010.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

~~~
tmhedberg
As when Knuth stopped releasing new versions of TeX because it reached a point
where it was "done", software that has been around for long enough can
eventually mature to the point where there's nothing left to add without
expanding the scope of the project beyond its original definition.

Mutt may simply be at that point. I use Mutt as my primary MUA in a very
similar manner to the author of the article, and I can't really say that there
are any features that I want that it lacks. Of course, I can't speak for
everyone on that point; for instance, some people actually want to send and
receive HTML email, and Mutt can't easily deal with that. But for some of us,
lack of HTML support is itself a feature, and when you really have to, piping
a text/html MIME part to a browser for rendering is really easy to accomplish.

I know essentially nothing about Sparrow, but I suspect that it is a much
newer product than Mutt, has had far less time to mature, and as such simply
requires a more frequent release schedule than a project with Mutt's long
history.

Basically, a comparison between most recent release dates doesn't necessarily
mean what you think it means.

~~~
kapowaz
I knew if I made this joke I'd get a wall of text explaining why I was wrong;
thanks, HN — you delivered!

On a more serious note, I use Sparrow every day. About the only quibble I have
with it is some of the icons aren't retina versions (hardly a dealbreaker).
Otherwise I'd say it meets my needs very well; doesn't that also make it
‘done’, rather than ‘effectively dead’?

------
jason_slack
Steve, I was just looking at Mutt this weekend. Thank you so much for this
blog post. It will give me the push to just go and do it. Learn in the process
too. How can one say no to that?

------
lorenzfx
if you want to use your CardDAV address book with mutt, you might want to try
out pycarddav <http://lostpackets.de/pycarddav/> . If you want features like
write support, try the write_support branch from github
<https://github.com/geier/pycarddav/> (you can not really edit vCards just
yet, but you can add email address directly from mutt)

------
dllthomas
I like nmh, myself.

~~~
dredmorbius
How-to article?

~~~
antidoh
<http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/>

Jerry Peek's MH book, free to read. How-to times ten.

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nine_k
I think the very idea of pitching mutt to Sparrow target audience is
brilliant. Getting out of your comfort zone may be gainful :)

------
dustinswan
I've been waiting for this post since you first hinted at it. Looking forward
to reading it, thanks.

------
WayneDB
"...it’s got a lot of advantages over many other email clients."

The advantages were never enumerated. Most of the article was spent teaching
you how to program ^H^H^H configure the thing.

What are the advantages?

~~~
davvid
_What are the advantages?_

One advantage: you can configure mutt to behave just like vim (as far as
shortcut keys go).

If you don't use vim you won't understand. If you do use vim, having mutt use
vim for editing combined with vim-ish hotkeys makes for a very powerful,
simple, and enjoyable tool.

~~~
WayneDB
"If you don't use vim you won't understand."

Well, thanks for your insight but that was kind of a dick way to put it. What
do you think is so hard to understand about the advantage of common key-
bindings between applications?

Great trade-off though. You are such a cool hacker. Too bad you have to jump
through hoops to view modern HTML formatted email. Hey you've got some _vim
key bindings_ though. Totally worth it.

