I use offlineimap to get my mail to my local machine in maildir format, so no need for any imap etc in mutt.
Bonus: I can use tools like cat and grep etc on the emails.
Also, there's a lot of tools to have mutt imap support work with gmail/office365 etc.
I think you’re mistaken. Mutt works fine with IMAP servers. It’s quite flexible. In the small minority of cases when I need to see the email in a full-blown web browser, it takes two keystrokes to open it there.
I know this. i've spent a lot of time years ago to configure mutt to fetch my gmail/hotmail/free accounts and it worked pretty well. But when you change computer hardware what a hassle to reconfigure everything. Such a simple thing like sending email should now be a no-brainer. i quit this dogma to use my brain for more insighful things
If you want your email locally: Use offlineimap to grab the email for example. There are many ways to connect.
If not: there are a lot of python/bash scripts to make imap/whatever work with mutt
Almost all of them use configuration files that can be stored in git/svn/csv/etc
The thing about offlineimap and isync (which I prefer because it is significantly faster in my experience) is they work great until they don't. I originally switched from offlineimap to isync, because of some bug (might have been offlineimap or exchange IMAP support, I don't recall) which caused some email loss.
Just this week I had to deal with some isync issue which causes the sync to duplicate mails when uploading to the server. I still haven't figured out what's going on, I'm getting Keywords not supported errors from the server when syncing, which caused this. It happened once before and I had to wipe the whole directory and resync to fix it.
I am now looking at what other solution to use. I used to use muttator which was a plugin for thunderbird that emulated mutt behavior and was great, but that hasn't been maintained for >7 years
I configured mine only on the days I switched jobs. Copy one entry to a new one, changed name, changed password/oauth keys and ran `git add .dotfiles/offlineimap.conf && git commit -m "new work email configs" && git push` and call it a day.
This is less time than I spend with ANY other program I use at a new job
How many time you spent the first time you digged into theses tools ? i'm sorry but i'm ready to spend huge amount of time to learn tools like GCC or anything else that's complex. Not for sending mail.
Not to speak about real life use case were the email is HTML formatted with images.
mutt, as far as i know is rooted to Unix local email handling. Which is not very friendly when used with common web providers 99% people use today
In 2022, I love linux and command line. But mutt is outside the limit i can tolerate about this dogma.