[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.

[YPCrumble]

I would love to read a blog post on this setup.

[AlexeyBrin]

It will be great if you could write a blog post about how to reproduce your 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!

[semi-extrinsic]

Depending on what kind of Word documents you get, you might be interested in trying terminal doc(x) to plain text converters. Last I checked they were fairly good for simple things.

[_atc]

Also been using pine/alpine/re-alpine now for 16 years, and also not with gmail. Last I checked their IMAP wasn't fully IMAP. Fastmail FTW

[bsg75]

Using v2.20 [1] built from http://repo.or.cz/alpine.git I have Gmail working without much hassle using these docs: https://www.sjwrc.com/guides/alpine-and-gmail/ - namely just the IMAP paths.

[1] http://patches.freeiz.com/alpine/release/

[l_zzie]

Do you browse to html files on your attachment server? That's a pretty bad idea security-wise

[rsync]

"Do you browse to html files on your attachment server?"

No, I don't.

[sigil]

> I often receive emails with attached images or HTML code.

Here's my ~/.mailcap file:

    text/html; w3m -T text/html
    image/gif; gm display -
    image/jpg; gm display -
    image/eps; gm display -
    application/postscript; gm display -
    application/pdf; evince /dev/stdin

In mutt's pager view (reading a message), hit "v" to see all the mime parts, j and k to select one, and enter to view it with the associated mailcap command. In my mailcap I'm popping up images in GraphicsMagick, and viewing rendered html pages in w3m. Pretty rare for me when that doesn't cut it -- most mail has a readable plaintext part or a w3m-readable html part.

> Maybe some Mutt user can share with me some of the reasons why they like it so much?

It lets me fully reside in "the world of text:"

- I can compose emails in my text editor (vim, like you) instead of a crappy textarea.

- Mutt feels much faster than gmail and other gui mail clients. The keyboard shortcuts are amazing.

- I can use tmux's activity monitor feature as a text-based growl notification for new mail.

- All my mail (300k+ messages over 10+ years) is available locally, offline, in Maildirs. It's searchable and pliable by the unix toolset, enabling all kinds of fun things like [1]. I use and recommend offlineimap.

- Control. Mutt has changed conservatively over the years. You can configure it to your liking, and be reasonably certain it will continue working to your liking. No "New Compose" crap here. Tools like mutt are a great long haul investment.

One thing I find seriously lacking with mutt: the folder-centric message index (instead of tag-centric or search-centric index). You can get by okay with mutt's searching and limiting, but if you're jumping between folders often, it kinda sucks. Reminds me, I need to revisit mutt-kz.

[1] https://twitter.com/alangrow/status/448965593564078080

[cm3]

> I need to revisit mutt-kz

I haven't used it myself, but there's also https://www.neomutt.org/.

[sigil]

Interesting, thanks.

[krrrh]

I like the idea of having a large mail archive available locally for searching, but what do you do for mobile access? The utility of being able to search 10+ years of quickly while AFK is very high. I'd love to have a synced local archive that resided entirely on the mobile device.

[necessity]

The w3m bit doesn't work for me, mutt itself opens it and fails to format it. I have to type | to pipe it to w3m (or save the file).

[dredmorbius]

There's a commandline option to pass the document type to w3m: '-T text/html', I believe, confirm on the manpage.

It'll force any given file, or stdin, to be interpreted as HTML. It helps to remember that w3m was originally created as a generic file / directory browser. It's Web capabilities were somewhat incidental, though that's what it's largely used for now.

[sigil]

Sounds a problem with your mailcap.

[h43z]

Mutt makes writing/reading/searching/managing email just really fast. Mutt also allows to pass the message body to an external program. This helps for formatting HTML mails. This is a snippet from my .mailcap file which renders HTML mail through lynx.

  text/html; lynx -dump -force_html %s;  needsterminal; copiousoutput

[baldfat]

I output my mutt to w3m with using feh for images. Not always the right tool for the job but it is an easy way to find out if it is.

[setrofim_]

- Seamlessly use Vim to write and edit email

- Can easily deal with large volumes of email -- quickly tab through unread messages

- Highlights text from previous emails in a thread, making it easy to see who replied to what

- You can also set up highlighting for diffs, making it easy to review attached patches and change snippets

- Powerful search via external indexers (mu, notmuch)

- Keyboard navigation for everything (if you're using vim and tmux, then you're already spending most of your time with your hands on the keyboard, and having to fish for the mouse just to quicky reply to an email starts to feel really slow).

For handling HTML email, I use a two-pronged approach: for most email I use links browser to automatically render HTML as ASCII so I can view it directly in mutt; for email that has images or otherwise cannot be rendered sensibly with links, I have mapped a key to open it in a graphical browser (dwb for fast launching or Firefox+vimperator if I need to deal with login forms, etc).

EDIT: formatting

[Lio]

iTerm2 (and I'm sure there's Linux equivalents) can display images inline in the terminal.

It would be cool if Mutt could be configured to support that, maybe through the w3mimgdisplay command. I think that's how [ranger file browser](https://github.com/ranger/ranger) does it.

[SerSwimsALot]

Number one reason why I switched to mutt was after mailbox was discontinued, I wanted an easy way to move my mail between several organized folders (this requires 3+ clicks in gmail). Now I have keyboard shortcuts to move a message to my various frequented folders, and I can move through dozens of email in less than a minute.