
Using Gmail with Mutt - wheresvic1
https://smalldata.tech/blog/2016/09/10/gmail-with-mutt
======
brandur
I've been using Mutt with Gmail for years to great effect, and would very much
recommend the set up.

The one caveat that I should point out (because it's not mentioned in the
article) is that you will probably never be fully rid of official Gmail
clients. There is still no good mechanism to use some features with Mutt like
thread muting, and these are essential to effective email these days. It's
also often more convenient to read certain types of email (e.g. messages that
are heavy in multimedia) from a client that supports graphics.

My usual habit is to read email in the web client or on mobile, and respond to
or compose mail from within Mutt.

~~~
sigil
> There is still no good mechanism to use some features with Mutt like thread
> muting.

I use `collapse-thread` (Esc-v) on long threads I don't care about, but you're
right this is less than ideal. New messages in the thread uncollapse it again,
and there's no way to persist the collapsed state, so switching mailboxes or
restarting mutt loses it.

------
jrcii
I've got Mutt going with Gmail along the lines of Steve Losh's advice
[http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-
mutt/](http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/)

It works great. Very fast, and it's nice to have a local backup of my email.

~~~
cbracken
Agreed, by far the best guide I've found. My setup, based on that guide + some
tweaks is at
[https://github.com/cbracken/mutt](https://github.com/cbracken/mutt) for
anyone who might find another sample useful.

------
nabucodonosor
Like the post. What I did differently is to use fdm to fetch emails and store
them locally. I've been using Mutt with Gmail for many years. The features I
like most are:

\- regex search

\- faster actions (like batch delete, mark as read) using tag

\- can use my editor to compose. I use emacsclient -nw and it's so easy to
copy things from shared buffer.

\- very easy to customize, for example, I want to see the timestamp as local
time regardless of the sender's timezone, I wrote a smile Go program to do
that
[https://github.com/wujiang/localize_mutt;](https://github.com/wujiang/localize_mutt;)
I also run a cronjob to archive old emails.

------
Gxorgxo
I love to use the terminal—I'm a Vim and tmux user—but I was never really able
to switch to Mutt. I often receive emails with attached images or HTML code.
Maybe some Mutt user can share with me some of the reasons why they like it so
much?

~~~
rsync
I am a 20+ year (al)pine user (without gmail - I host my own mail server) and
I have a fairly decent attachment/images/links setup ...

First, I use ripmime to dump every single attachment to a folder with dated
naming - and so if there is an email in pine with an attachment I want to
view, I just web browse a simple apache directory listing and click it. It's
not sexy, but it's fast and efficient.

Second, I have a terminal PDF reader installed on my system and defined in
alpine as a helper app for pdf files. So I cannot read word or excel _right in
alpine_ but I _can_ read PDF docs. So that's nice and slick.

Finally, I never actually click links in alpine, but I defined lynx as a web
viewer _anyway_ because that allows me to get the very simple "do you want to
view this http link ?" prompt from alpine ... which I always say NO to, but
not until I have copied the full URL which they display for me. Then I just
open it in a browser.

Fairly happy with this setup.

~~~
superdaniel
Not trying to be snarky, but why not use something like Thunderbird (or
whatever comes default on the OS of the machine that you're using) that will
render out the HTML natively?

~~~
luxpir
If he's anything like me, a fellow mutt user, he cares more about speed and
the text itself than pretty columns. It's surprising how little you miss html,
particularly when breezing through email at a rate of knots. Plus system
resources. So many resources.

~~~
CaptSpify
Not OP, but...

I find the inability to display HTML emails a feature, not a bug.

~~~
rsync
ding!

------
jacobsenscott
mutt + offlineimap + gmail is fantastic. When I need to use their web
interface it is painful. mu gives you almost instant search, but I almost
never need to search email so I don't have that dialed in.

~~~
ninjin
I use a similar set-up, but I had a really bad time making offlineimap sync
work. In the end I switched to isync which was easier to configure. It has
fewer features, but it has worked out great for me with `Flatten .` turned on
in the configuration file.

~~~
jacobsenscott
Yeah. Offlineimap was a bear to get working right. I've heard good things
about isync, but I don't really want to touch the house of cards now that it
is all working.

------
wyclif
Is it possible to use mutt and Gmail without enabling lesssecureapps? I know
this post deals with some of those issues (gpg keys and whatnot), and Google
strongly recommends IMAP/SMTP protocol users switch to OAuth 2.0, etc.

~~~
bartbes
I was honestly surprised to see all this gpg setup, yet no mention of
application-specific passwords. I've been using email clients with what google
now calls an "App password" for years.

~~~
fishywang
"application-specific passwords" are not actually restricted to a single
application. You can restrict the scope (only has access to your emails, for
example), but any application could use this password to access your emails.

~~~
bartbes
Sure, but you can revoke them without changing your password or revoking other
app passwords, making it much easier to recover if they do leak.

------
daily-q
Anyone here coming from nmh, but prefer to use Mutt? I was wondering if Mutt
is worth the switch since some things in nmh seem hard to keep up to snuff
with the ever-changing www.

~~~
dllthomas
I much prefer nmh.

------
jakeogh
If you like mutt, you will really like alot.
[https://github.com/pazz/alot](https://github.com/pazz/alot)

~~~
k2enemy
I tried alot years ago and loved it, but it had the huge caveat that it didn't
write changes back to a maildir. This made it really hard to incorporate into
a multi-device setup. Do you know if this has been added? I didn't see an
obvious answer on the github page.

~~~
jakeogh
You mean write to the maildir sent folder? Or metadata like read and other
tags? I don't have metadata sync but I bet there's a way to do it via xapian.

For multi-device, I use a MDA[1] on postfix that writes to a maildir, and
that's rsynced to my various boxes. When I send, ssh pipes the msg to sendmail
on the server, which copies it to the .sent folder.

[1]:
[https://github.com/jakeogh/gpgmda/blob/master/gpgmda](https://github.com/jakeogh/gpgmda/blob/master/gpgmda)

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Plug for the mutt replacement I'm working on:

[https://github.com/SirCmpwn/aerc](https://github.com/SirCmpwn/aerc)

~~~
bo1024
Can you say what about mutt you dislike or want to improve?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Mutt doesn't do networking well. It was build to deal with Maildir and mbox on
a local disk, not IMAP over the network. aerc is designed to just support
IMAP, and it does networking on a second thread so issues there don't lock up
the UI. aerc also supports multiple accounts. It also has (imo) better
configuration and commands.

~~~
luxpir
Can confirm. Long-term mutt-er who frequently switches between wired and
wireless networks. I basically just ctrl+z any frozen mutt instance and start
over. 'fg 1' brings up the first when back on the first network...

But overall love mutt and think aerc is a great initiative. Nice to have an
inbuilt sidebar too! Beats recompiling mutt with sidebar patches.

How's aerc with gpg, search, offline storage?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
>How's aerc with gpg, search, offline storage?

Currently, terrible. It doesn't support those things at all. It doesn't even
have an email reader, it just lets you browse subjects at the moment. It's
very much in dev, and I could use some help :)

I intend to have excellent gpg support, decent search support, and no support
for offline storage whatsoever.

------
hiphopyo
I always used what I saw as the simplest Mutt setup possible:
[https://gist.github.com/anonymous/ca8dc3ecba60bdee41abb241e6...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/ca8dc3ecba60bdee41abb241e6f6fc24)
along with:

mutt -f imaps://imap.gmail.com

------
lighttower
google-Calendar as a widget on my linux (mate) desktop. Aside from [1] does
anyone have a working setup?

[1] [https://www.linux.com/learn/tricks-using-desktop-
integrated-...](https://www.linux.com/learn/tricks-using-desktop-integrated-
calendars)

