mutt or nothing
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
28 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
1270 readers
17 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I learned about mutt ~12 years ago, and it changed my email-interface forever
all mutt, all the time
How has your experience been with Mutt? I've heard about neomutt from a lot of people but I'm honestly a bit intimidated to move to a completely CLI-based email client especially because it's another configuration file which I'll need to be mindful of
I really liked the client but HTML emails are a real pain in the ass.
I use evolution and it works well for everything besides my work Gmail but that has more to do with security policies than evolution
I was pleasantly surprised with Evolution the last time I tried to use Gnome, it used to be a buggy, bloated mess. But alas, I can't manage to use Gnome for more than a release or two. Now I'm looking for a decent Wayland native alternative to Thunderbird, but it just doesn't exist without DE bloat at this point. Maybe someone will build a modern replacement for Sylpheed/Claws.
Where indexing and searching mails is concerned, notmuch is the best I've seen. Do note that this is not an e-mail client, it only indexes, tags and searches (following the "UNIX philosophy" of doing one job well).
I personally use it with neomutt as a mail user agent, which is almost certainly not what you want. Notmuch supports other clients but they're all pretty arcane.
So this is not a recommendation, just a glimpse into advanced e-mail setups I guess.
this is one of the things that struck me about email clients on Linux – CLI and GUI clients have followed two very different evolutionary paths – the CLI clients went for the “doing one job well” path (where you end up assembling a whole system of apps for sending and receiving email) and the GUI clients went for the “everything and the kitchen sink” path (where you end up trying to hide half the options so they don’t get in your way)
Tired of Gmail? Switch to Kmail!
Oof
You do you, but some of us don't miss 1995
Looks fine to me! ¯\(°_o)/¯
Claws searches reasonably quickly and unlike thunderbird it isn't a total resource hog. OTOH it suffers from not being multi threaded, which means when you first install it, expect it to take literally hours before it finishes syncing all your emails.
Mutt is not multi threaded either. Only thunderbird and kmail are, and kmail is a buggy mess, while thunderbird eats your ram like it's a plate of cheese danishes.
I've settled for using Thunderbird for POP + Recoll for search. I can't believe how good Recoll is; in my opinion this is even better than Gmail's search in their Web GUI. I will be using Recoll for a lot more things now, but my immediate need for search has been fixed for now. Though running Thunderbird just for downloading emails does seem a bit overkill. We'll see
If it works, it works -- glad you found a way
Any time I want to watch my emails I just go to the web ui for it. I doubt any 3rd party client will ever come close to what google and Microsoft offer for their own email accounts.
I'd prefer not to go to their Web UIs because of how much tracking is present on those sites (adding rules and filters to ublock origin for Gmail nearly killed me). I'd prefer a FOSS option.
… they already have your emails. Not only that, but just about everything else they could possibly want to know about you.
Unless you plan on moving to a more private provider I wouldn’t worry about that.
Do they know everything about you minute to minute? Email to email? I can imagine that is data they might want to have. The data you are presently creating. You always have a footprint, but you can always make your feet smaller while you walk. Or some better allusion. Leave me alone.
Agreed, and I do plan to move to other providers. I should add that I find a desktop client convenient, and I don't mind the Thunderbird UI at the moment. Unfortunately, lack of a single feature breaks it for me
I use Betterbird as my main email client so I tried out the attachment searching. Searching by attachment name seemed to work well, but it doesn't look like it searches for the text within the documents, at least not for PDFs. Not sure if there's like an OCR extension or anything that would do it, but yeah just the base Betterbird install doesn't do it as far as I can see.
Why not Roundcube ?
sudo apt install claws-mail
Fast, reliable, insanely functional - weird formats. Yes it has a calendar, works great.
Over ten years ago I was looking for a foss email client and I was really hesitant on claws because the interface looked ridiculously dated, but settled on it anyway because it seemed the most appropriate for me out of what was available.
The interface has received zero facelifts since then, but it's grown to become endearing because the software has been fantastic and reliable for years. I don't need a lot of bells and whistles in an email client, so maybe it's missing features others might want, but it does everything I care about and needs minimal setup.