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
I miss mutt a lot, and would much rather be using it than the weird web messes we have. But I also have to have extremely specific corporate branding in all my outgoing emails. It's stupid as hell but it's also not worth fighting about.
Six hours of wrangling some HTML merging later, I get a message from bizdev@company.com
"Hi morelisp,
In the last email you sent the logo wasn't properly aligned to the left with the text and the font of the phone number was not correct. Please reset your signature block in your Outlook configuration based on the official template."
I once worked in a shop where Exchange was configured not to send text equivalent with HTML emails. Even messages sent in plain text would be munged by Exchange into unreadable HTML hash. These may in fact be the default settings. I emailed the sysadmin asking that they be changed, and his only response was "Try using an email client from this century."
Mutt is NOT suited for the professional world. The professional world has standardized on Outlook and Exchange. If you use something different, no one is going to change anything for your prima donna ass if your emails turn out unreadable. Use Outlook for your company mail.
I have not found any issues using other email clients (including mutt) in our exchange environment. In fact one thing that can be said about outlook is that every single user hates it and their webclient is even worse.
Is the “professional world” a place where you’re paid for your work? Because I’ve been paid for my work for 35 years, and I’ve never touched or dealt with either of those programs. I’ve used Mutt for about 20 of those, and nobody’s complained about my emails, nor have I had any trouble reading others’. As other replies to you have pointed out, your particular experience is not definitive of the standards of some “professional world”. In fact, from your description, it sounds like you’ve been working in some pretty unprofessional places.
I understand the willignness to do everything in command line. But it's just dogma. Seriously, using so many external tools to deal with such a dumb and common thing like sending/read a mail doesn't have to be so complex. It's useless complexity for nothing. As i recall, mutt has been designed to handle local Unix mail. Not to deal with web providers as the majority of non-nerd people use today. It's a significant effort to configure the tool for this common use case, the soft originally has not been designed for that hense the useless effort to adapt it.
It's not my hobby anymore to spend time around this. I just use the app provided by my telecom provider to send SMS, i haven't configured an obscure TUI tool to interface my local 4G antenna to just tell my wife i'm well. Email is the same. Life is short hence the idea that using mutt is just a nerd hobby today. You can't advocate common mortal to go this way it's just outdated and overall ridiculous.
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.