On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 04:13:05PM +0500, Dmitri Minaev wrote: > Actually, considering the number of tools Mutt uses for work, I > suspect that it 'sucks less' just because it does less. You retrieve > mail with fetchmail or isync, filter it with procmail, write new > messages with vim and send them with msmtp. What does Mutt do, then? > ;)
Quite a lot actually. Yes, it does hand off a lot of tasks to other programs which are specifically written to do those jobs. With good reason. vim, for example, is an extremely powerful editor with a relatively small memory footprint. It is superb at what it does. Why should mutt try to re-invent the wheel, or using your philosophy, the world? If the mutt developers tried to write a built-in editor to edit mail, it would be far less powerful than vim, would make mutt's code an order of magnitude more complex, and most importantly would be a monumental waste of time. If they did the job well, what they would end up with is... vim (or emacs). Only, embedded in the mailer. The same goes for procmail, with regard to filters. Instead, Mutt follows the Unix Philosophy: do one well-defined job, and do it well. And it does that. So, what does mutt do? It provides an excellent terminal-based user interface to read, sort, and (visually) organize and filter mail. It does an excellent job of searching through mail in individual folders using regular expressions. It does a pretty good job of managing multiple "profiles" using its various hooks... It's very smart about honoring various recipient headers, so you (usually) don't have to think about how to reply to mail to send it to the right people... Just press the right key for what you want to do. It allows me to change configuration settings on a per-folder basis. It allows me to use different colors to highlight mail from specific people, or mail about certain topics, or identify some criteria based on information in virtually any header in the message. It has good support for mailing lists, and excellent support for PGP messages (much better than pine, unless recent updates support the many "new" (i.e. not 20 years old) standards regarding e-mail encryption). A lot of GUI mailers don't get any of this right, or simply can't do it at all. And there's a lot of stuff it does that I don't have time to mention... Do I think mutt needs mail filters? Nope. I use fetchmail and procmail, and would continue to do so even if filters were available in my client, because those tools are the best BAR NONE at what they do. My coworkers are always complaining about their Outlook/Evolution filters losing mail to their spam filters... I just laugh. Does Mutt have weaknesses? Of course. But most of the ones people have highlighted in this thread either represent a misunderstanding of how mutt does things, and why it does them that way (i.e. they don't understand the Unix Philosophy and why that's a Good Thing); or they're just plain wrong. Mutt has vast power as a MUA, but along with that power comes the price of having to learn how to use it. A lot of people who complain that mutt can't do X simply haven't learned how. > I generally like TUI tools, but neither Mutt, nor Pine give me what I > get with GUI clients. You're right on this one, though actually Brendan Cully has done a tremendous job of improving the IMAP code over the last year or so. I haven't used IMAP in a very long time myself, so I can't speak to what improvements have been made; but I know that his changes have made a lot of people very happy. And I agree about having a basic SMTP engine too; MTAs can be a pain to set up even for seasoned administrators... A user should not have to go through all that just to forward outgoing mail to his ISP; and even if there are some small ones out there that aren't too hard to set up, many users don't have the option, because they don't control their mail system. That's an argument that comes up often... > Anyway, TUI clients share the same problem -- you cannot open more > than one message. Am I asking too much? :) Er... sure they can. 1. Start screen, or two xterms, or whatever. 2. run one copy of mutt, view your 1st message. 3. run another copy of mutt... ;-) Want more than that from a terminal-based MUA? Then yeah, you are definitely asking too much. Besides... you can only read one mail at a time, so what's the big deal? :) [No, this is not a serious question.] > [1] - Won't even mention things like storing non-mail items in IMAP folders > :) Hmph. They're called mail folders for a reason. They're for... storing mail. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D
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