Mutt Fork Adds Features From Notmuch 93
Karel Zak started a fork of Mutt back in January to integrate features the upstream authors deemed too radical, and today released the first status update. So far implemented is native notmuch support (inspired by Sup) which adds fast search, tagging, and virtual folders from notmuch queries. Unlike the current hackish solutions, all of these are available as native mutt commands and can be used in your muttrc. Additionally, patches from Debian and other distributions will be integrated. Source is over at Github, and a few screenshots are on their wiki.
Re:Who uses Mutt? (Score:5, Insightful)
* it's fast
* it *doesn't* run javascript or display images
* it doesn't try to display messages in some ghastly proportional font.
* it doesn't fuck with my mailboxes or try to move/import them into it's own format.
* it's a mail reader. it doesn't pretend to be a mail sorter/filter as well, i leave that to procmail.
* excellent searching and tagging operations.
* regexp support for searching and tagging.
* it works identically for me whether i'm physically in front of the machine or connected via ssh.
* in combination with screen, I don't even have to restart mutt when i login, i just connect to the screen session.
* i get multi-folder support by running 20 or so mutts in the background, each one with a different mailbox open. switch using ^Z and shell fg command.
* no crappy built-in editor.
* 'set edit_headers' in .muttrc lets me edit the ALL of the headers as well as the body - convenient for trimming the To:/CC: list, or deleting unwanted In-Reply-To or References headers (i.e. lazy group reply for a new msg without hijacking an existing thread).
* lots of other benefits, too numerous to mention.
Re:Who uses Mutt? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who's using Mutt? Any serious email user who doesn't top-post. The crowds went to ICQ in late 90s, GaduGadu/MSN/... in 2000s, some Facebook junk in 2010s. Business users keep sending mails with no subject that have no content except for a Word or Excel attachment -- or even worse, a .bmp file (although that's typically embedded in a .docx nowadays).
I personally have Thunderbird/Icedove on all the time, used as nothing else but a glorified biff and a tool to view attachments sent by the business folk from the previous sentence. Any actual mails go via mutt ("actual mail" defined as something consisting of text rather than an almost bare attachment).
GUI clients tend to choke horribly on any mailing lists, or any structured conversations.
Re:Who uses Mutt? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who uses Mutt? (Score:3, Insightful)
Infinitely better support for identities (Score:4, Insightful)
Every other email client supports identities in the same clumsy fashion. Each and every identity must be individually configured in. That's fine when you four and they never change. It is nearly useless when you have 400 and add several new ones each week.
Mutt lets me define identities with regular expressions. I can set alternates=(.*@foo,example.com,.*@bar.example.com)
Now every user @foo.example.com and @bar.example.com will match as me, even ones I haven't thought up yet.
When sending a new message, I can type in whatever I want in the From: field. When the reply comes in, it is automatically recognized if it matches an established pattern. I haven't had to change my alternates in years even though I have added hundreds of identities.