[wt__]

An observation: I switched to mainly reading my email in a text client (vi-cmdg, which is a fork of cmdg, a Gmail client that uses the API rather than IMAP - the fork has vim keybindings).

I’m finding I can process email quicker and it’s less stressful than using say Apple Mail, which in turn is always less stressful than the Gmail web client.

I think it might be because: - black and white and effectively dark mode due to my terminal - much less furniture on the screen - not seeing images in the emails (there’s a shortcut to render stuff with a roughly HTML-equivalent line wrap) - its slightly more work to click links (keyboard shortcut which adds numbers next to each link for you to press) but that doesn’t seem to irritate me too much - you get a simple list of attachments - you can write replies in Vim, which I quite like

Interested to hear if anyone else is doing this…

[ttunguz]

I completely agree. I switched to neomutt three or four years ago and there are a few things with text-based emails that really accelerate my workflow.

1. Fewer distractions. 2. Scripting keyboard shortcuts through emails - creating a to-do from an email with just tapping a function key, for example, or adding a company to a CRM with another function key tap. 3. Being able to delete emails with a Regex filter, which is really important for mailing lists. 4. Much faster latency which Though it seems to be trivial Google's research has shown is important to great user experiences 5. Ability to use neovim within the email client. 6. Local search using not much which again much lower latency than Google even for very large mailboxes.

[ylee]

>An observation: I switched to mainly reading my email in a text client (vi-cmdg, which is a fork of cmdg, a Gmail client that uses the API rather than IMAP - the fork has vim keybindings).

Welcome to the club. I've been using Emacs continuously for almost three decades, 99.9999% of the time text-only (whether Linux console, X terminal console, xterm, or SSH client) on a remote server. My email client is VM, written in Emacs Lisp. I've used it to read mail for almost as long as I've used Emacs.

VM (and ancillary tools, like Personality Crisis and mairix)

* does a great of job displaying HTML messages with Emacs's integrated W3M browser engine. For the very few that it doesn't, one keystroke sends the message to my web browser running locally.

* sends URLs I select (all from the keyboard) to the web browser (it doesn't use the add-number method; rather, W3M's built-in navigation keystrokes are available, including Tab and Shift-Tab for moving between links)

* opens images and attachments

* auto-adjusts the From: line of outgoing messages depending on the recipient

* archives messages to various folders using various criteria

* searches my archived mail at lightning speed

Of course, I can write Emacs Lisp code of my own to extend any or all of the above.

VM isn't perfect but, overall, I really feel like I have a superpower for email handling with it. (But I will check out cmdg; using the API is intriguing.)