A Minimal Email Client
manuelmoreale.com
manuelmoreale.com
(Looks like someone has done a minor comparison[2])
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/ebite6/mu4e_vs_gnus_...)
The design is extraordinarily elegant. It's almost like a purely functional email client. It never touches your messages. All it does is to alter a separate tag database. Then it's up to you how to turn tags into mailbox actions, like deleting or archiving emails. It sounds complicated, but it's trivial to setup and allows infinite flexibility in how to handle emails.
The Emacs interface is beautiful, quite similar to Magit. If Emacs is not your cup of tea, it's quite easy to use as a backend for Mutt. In fact, Neomutt already comes with Notmuch bundled and deeply integrated.
Is notmuch able to attach inline images from the clipboard, and render images in emails?
I have never attached inline images as I always compose plain text emails, so I don't know about that one.
However, I still find Mu and Notmuch TUIs quite different.
Why else use Mu?
I'm just getting my ducks in a row for migrating to fully self-hosted e-mail and I have an idea of what I want but I'm not sure how best to achieve it. I have not yet fully settled on any part of the stack. What I want:
Catch-all e-mail addresses with dynamic filtering/folders based on address. For example, say I have the domain myemail.com. I'd like to be able to register at sketchysite.com with sketchysite@myemail.com. It should get filtered to its own inbox/folder. All these should be accessible from the same application/view/search space inside my e-mail client. I should not have to add new inboxes as they come and go (many will be ephemeral), either on client or server side.
By default, replying to an e-mail will always use the recipient address as the sender.
Has anybody set up something similar? Any particular client or server you would say is suitable/unsuitable?
Only hard requirements are FOSS, Linux, IMAP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System
If you're a CLI junkie like me, I think you'll like mblaze[0]. It's written by one of the maintainers of Void Linux, Lea Neukirchen, FWIW.
[1]: https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/94
My current stack is: Mutt, Neovim, fdm, msmtp, Syncthing, notmuch, lynx (for HTML conversion), mblaze [2] (for scripting), and a tiny pair of scripts to snooze and unsnooze e-mails. Here is an interesting observation, although a pipeline like this may look terrifying, it makes swapping in Aerc to take it for a spin trivial since it all interacts with a Maildir.
Also if you change folders frequently you can put: set sleep_time=0
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I too enjoy inbox zero and have trimmed my toolbar down to these basics... https://i.imgur.com/ao9U9UX.png
I will absolute purchase a license when it’s out of beta.
Because I have some pretty large mailboxes on my Mac, and Mail.app searches/indexes them like a champ. The search, in fact, is what KEEPS me on Mail.app -- it would be way more convenient for me professionally to surrender to Outlook, and Mac Outlook is really not bad, but holy hell is Outlook's search GARBAGE compared to the Mac client.
The frequent example is pretty crazy. I work for a small software company. We have a low-cost product that we sell that uses actual license keys we have to generate. The task of actually generating those keys, and thus doing the formal "this is your delivery" emails, falls to me b/c it involves SQL. Takes 2 minutes, so nobody wants to spend the time writing a front end for it, etc. Familiar story I'm sure.
Anyway, so I send out the fulfillment mails. Boss always gets a copy. They always have a PO number in the subject line. He'll search his Outlook, and VERY VERY OFTEN Outlook can't find it. I'll search MY mail in Mail.app, and can forward it back to him in seconds. I've watched him do it. I've duplicated the failure myself -- I have true-blue Outlook running in a VM, bc sometimes you need it for calendar stuff -- and it just plain fails. A LOT.
It sure seems like "search" would be an important part of a good email client, but Microsoft appears to disagree.
Currently, it finds only a few random scraps and doesn't search the entire mailbox. Spotlight still works; searching by the text in Spotlight shows a match, but clicking on the match (to open it in Mail) does nothing. I've tried rebuilding the mailbox and I've tried wiping the entire Mail directory; nothing works. Apparently other people have the same issue, but I haven't found a solution.
This is too bad, because Mail.app is probably the most functional, no-nonsense client for macOS. I've tried some others (Airmail, Spark, Polymail, etc.), but they have a lot of usability issues and weird features (like Sparrow's team support) that are irrelevant to me.
I don’t know why they did this. I don’t know who was asking for it.
I'm not too keen or worried about Inbox Zero but I try to clean up once a while. Here are archived screenshots from my yearly digital review/detox/cleansing sessions around the year-end.
2019: http://public.oinam.com/photos-oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos-...
2020: http://public.oinam.com/photos-oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos-...
The only issues became how much disk mail.app takes and search became slow after 6+ years.
I'm not sure I trust it security wise.
I’ve used nmh for over a decade, but mostly due to inertia. nmh has some issues displaying and (especially) replying to some of the crazier modern formats, although it does a much better job now than even just a few years ago.
At this point I’m experimenting with alternatives. I too have concerns about its security (I fear anything from crufty C exploits to MIME parsing exploits to spec‐compliant misfeatures that leak privacy). Maildir is supported by a variety of software I’m interested in (mblaze, mu, notmuch), and honestly I think it’s a better format: the good things about mh format (easy shell manipulation with one mail per file) without some of the less desirable parts (for instance, Maildir keeps flags in the filename, while mh marks the message with custom headers, thus modifying the content).
One of my favourite things in mailmate is the ability to auto generate sub-folders in a smart folder based on rules. When I discovered this feature when trialing the product my first inclination was to create a smart folder replicating my inbox, with a rule creating sub-folders for every unique sender. I marvelled at my genius and purchased the product immediately. To this day this system is my main method to quickly scan and archive old inbox conversations sender by sender.
Under OpenBSD you can set stmpd relaying mail to another host pretty easily, but IDK under OSX.
- There's an unremovable vertical separator, which is related to the new sidebar behavior. - The filter button seems unremovable. - Other toolbar buttons can be moved to the left of the sidebar-related vertical separator, but the flex-space doesn't work the same as described in the article. As a result, the search bar can't be centered.
I wonder though, how do you keep the client minimal, while also maintaining a useful level of functionality?
It's something I've tackled with over the years while developing DarwinMail[1]. I've always tried to keep the UI clean and clutter free, while still providing all the functionality the user would like (that I learn about from feedback and also from other tools research).
I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you decide what features make the cut, and how they are designed?
Lots of screenshots at link above.
I would like to see a minimalist email client with a nice simple UI but maybe text-based config? A crossover between TextMate and pine.
Edit: thanks to the comment below, I had to read the post twice to get that it was not a new app and just a reconfig of Mail.app duh...
It doesn't get less minimal than that ;)
I didn't want to spend money on Internet access in the early 2000's and libraries didn't permit access to SSH, so I made a super simple webmail client to browse a maildir as well as a form to send messages to other people. It was orders of magnitude better than the webmail services most people were using (this was just before Gmail shook everything up).