It was almost four years ago I switched from webmail to a customized
email configuration based on Notmuch and Emacs. Notmuch served as both as a native back-end that provided indexing and tagging, as well as a front-end, written in Emacs Lisp. It dramatically improved my email experience, and I wished I had done it earlier. I’ve really enjoyed having so much direct control over my email.However, I’m always fiddling with things – fiddling feels a lot more productive than it actually is – and last month I re-invented my email situation, this time switching to a combination of Mutt, Vim, mu, and tmux. The entirety of my email interface now resides inside a terminal, and I’m enjoying it even more. I feel I’ve “leveled up” again in my email habits.
I’m fairly sure a number of OSNews readers use similar setups.
A lot of the email I get these days is (unfortunately) full of images and HTML markup. How does it handle all of that?
I use mutt for my personal email too – I just have it set up so that I can view html in lynx. Its not going to show images in a terminal but that’s very rarely a problem, 99% of html email gets deleted long before I care enough to open it with something else (if it gets past the spam filter).
Email has been dead to me for personal use for years. Now days, I just use it for bill pay notifications and such. Almost all of that is HTML-based.
What do you use instead of e-mail, pray tell? Facebook? WhatsApp?
Facebook Messenger or SMS. But then again, there’s only like two or three people I keep in touch with regularly, so …
E-mail and chat (FB Messenger) are completely different things. SMS also serves totally different purpose than e-mail. Apparently, you never used e-mail as it is supposed to be used in the first place, thus you have no problem to stop using it. The rest of us — we have no alternative.
Is email even useful for anything anymore ? We can easily send images, files, movies, audio and video calls via messenger apps directly. The last time I used personal email for something serious was maybe 5 years ago (except misc. messages from bank). What does email have ? Pathetic text/html only functionality and mediocre file sending capabilities.
You have obviously never worked in any corporation or even medium-sized company. There are exactly ZERO alternatives to e-mail in any mid- to large-size companies. And even small ones would have a great difficulty doing business with customers without e-mail.
Now, more to the point, detailed explanation…
Example: a threaded view of a conversation that happened over the course of 6 months and involved let’s say 8 people plus few group mailboxes/distribution lists, plus some external partners. There were many replies, some forwards, some replies to forwards, some appointments (calendar items), some attachments. You can see separate e-mails from that conversation in certain folders in your mailbox, but you can also see that entire conversation as a whole. There’s a signature with phone number after every single reply/forward, so that you can very quickly contact any person involved without hunting for his contacts.
Since it’s a very long and complex communication, some people used formatting to emphasise some parts of their long text, and to de-emphasise others. This makes it much easier to read quickly. Some included hyperlinks to KB articles, some copied portions of articles with the formatting (bullet lists, tables, etc.).
And you have a mailbox of 5 gigs, full of conversations like this, all easily searchable by many different parameters, all securely residing on both server AND your computers, accessible from any device with network connection. And you can be confident that you can reach any company and almost any person in the world by e-mail without them having to set-up an account to a specific IM provider (Facebook, Skype, Viber, WhatsApp…). And you don’t need to have a gazillion of different IM accounts yourself, because e-mail is universal, decentralised, does not require you to be tied to any particular provider… Hell, you can just as well run personal e-mail yourself if you so choose, and no one will care.
Now tell me, what other alternative would allow me to do all that?
Edited 2017-06-19 17:37 UTC
Excellent example, CATs. E-mails build on Former Mail protocols. And It is those protocols, which we are not going to trash. Ages wiseness embedded on them.
Outlook did so well [and Open Code so bad] at this because MS decided to respect those protocols. IBM did fine at this, too.
Edited 2017-06-21 14:07 UTC
They are usefull for many aspects. The first is freedom: you can easily run your own mailserver without depend on any other service. You can communicate with any over server without specific clients or OSes. With “offline” mail setup you also own your own messages, you can search them offline, backup them as you like, migrate them to any other service.
If Facebook decide to delete FB Messenger what you can do?
Well, I guess it’s a good thing we have your holiness to tell the rest of us how email is supposed to be used. Who knew we were doing it wrong all those years?
It’s one thing to be clueless, and entirely new level to be proud of your cluelessness like you do… Apparently, entire world is blind and stupid to be clinging to such an outdated, redundant and unnecessary technology as e-mail, and only a few tech geniuses here on OSNews know THE TRUTH — that e-mail can be replaced by Facebook chat… For gods’es sake, get over yourself, people…
Or to be more precise: get out of your mother’s basement and try to see a little further than just your own yard.
Edited 2017-06-19 17:07 UTC
LOL, can you point out exactly where I said that? I just said that *I* don’t use it anymore for personal communication, and I don’t really miss the spam and bullshit that comes along with it. That said, if it works for you and you want to keep using it, more power to you.
Easy with your caffeine, CATs. As you see, I’m also guessing.
As someone that has worked on sending mails recently through services such as SendGrid. You should send a text version and a HTML version of the mail.
I have found that personal correspondence is typically plain text. Some of it is sent with plain text and HTML, but the content is always identical. Bulk emails are much more likely to depend upon the HTML component.
There are two ways that I deal with that. Bulk emails are typically sent to an account that has a webmail interface and can be accessed via a graphical client. Personal correspondence is sent to a separate account (where the provider offers shell access and various email clients). The second method is to purge most bulk emails without even opening them. Simply put, most of them are not even worth my time.
Not well. I had a mutt based set up, but used a company web mail client for the non text based emails. Most human to human emails are text so it works fine for those. I dropped it as there were more and more automatically generated html emails I had to work with. Just became a pain to have both.
Mu devs build a nice webkit-based minisoftware who read a message and output a nice rendered pdf.
it’s part of mu suite, toy dir. on Debian-based system is named maildir-utils (they dislike short names…), on Arch is in AUR: mu-git. I personally use it inside Emacs via pdf-tools and it’s very nice. Of course, it’s not a good answer for terminal-based MUAs…
No way. Though I myself never send emails with HTML or inline images, I constantly receive such from customer.
Since years I have this footer:
PS: I prefer ASCII only email and pictures attached! NO HTML!
At university I loved Pine and working inside a terminal. But today, I cannot imagine to have a non-HTML, non-GFX email client.
Edited 2017-06-17 06:18 UTC
Basically, people who are able to use text-only e-mail clients, are using e-mail solely for personal chats and nothing more serious.
Not funny. I’ve been around computers long enough to know enough various ways to accomplish things to easily come to the conclusion that I’m not willing to go back ~20 years in comfort and functionality (mind you, there’s functionality and then there’s functionality). I’ve used mutt (as well as other clients) back in the day, but this day is not back then anymore.
Having said that, everyone should use whatever they feel comfortable with.
I’m using Emacs + wanderlust + imap server in the office. Having access to your email offline and online needing only minimal bandwidth works has worked very well for me.
And obviously customisation options are a lot better. I can reply with proper From/footer based on sender for example.
All you people may play with your email toys but I prefer to use a real email client for a real man. That is why I use NMH.
Bah! You and your oh-so-easy-to-use nmh. Real hackers use mh, and patch their outdated, obsolete code with arcane diff files.
At one time, when I had a 70+ line .tcshrc (just config options– the aliases were in .aliases) file, I used mh, and then switched to nmh. Being able to use tcsh or bash to manage your mailboxes was verra cool, but it got old– probably about the time everyone started sending Outlook messages as full base64 encoded mime for two words of text.
That’s absurd. Real men use MUSIC/SP. If your email client isn’t written in an unholy combination of IBM 370 assembler and FORTRAN, well you’re missing the good stuff.
…it became increasingly frustrating to deal with modern emails, which would come with HTML, images and quite often no text section at all.
You’d end up with the mail client often having to launch a Web browser to render a mail (and good luck if that’s set to lynx!). I eventually gave up and switched to Thunderbird, which works well enough for me.
I use ‘alpine’ in all servers and Thunderbird in my desktops.
Since efficiently managing my email isn’t part of my productivity habits anymore I don’t see the need to spend too much time worrying about it.
I also used to do things like that when I was at school and had too much free time. I remember once classmate pointing out to me that “Well, you can send your e-mails over telnet using SMTP commands, but what’s the point?”. And now I fully agree with him — the only point to all that is “just because I can”.
FTA: “It’s been really nice to have all my email sitting around as nothing more than a big pile of files like this.”
Our emails were individual files that we could mine for data in BeOS. Used it all the time. He’s just now getting around to this.
Looks like everyone is going back to simplicity. Odd.
My first IT company that I worked in had corporate mail server that used same principle: 1 e-mail = 1 file. 1 IMAP folder = 1 folder on disk. You could either use e-mail client, or just browse your mailbox folder on server using simple file explorer.
My brother has effectively abandoned not just email, but the phone and seems to live content with just Facebook Messenger.
Since this was the only way to communicate with him, then, I, too, am on Facebook Messenger. I learned all of this after I mailed him a phone so he would call me. Probably be the last phone conversation I’ll ever have with him.
Similarly, there’s this “pressure” for folks to use these alternative communication mechanisms — HipChat, Slack, etc. even at the corporate level. But what’s so curious about these is that they just create these islands. It must be just me, but I’ve found it impossible to join “public” HipChat channels, as they’re not part of my company’s “rooms”. (Oh, and we’ve left HipChat now we’re Slack — ok).
Meanwhile, we still have extensive email, with gratuitous top posting, attachments, forwards, thread follows, “reply alls”, etc. etc. When reading email was difficult, folks strived to minimize it. Now email is a huge, rich formatted page grandly displayed on this drive-in-theater sized 27″ inch display. This email is not well suited for an 80×25 green screen.
It was interesting to see the notes and comments on essentially the complete failure of encrypted email. It’s interesting because we do use encrypted email here. We use it as the transport for healthcare information. SMTP is effectively the underlying transport for S/MIME encrypted payloads. But that whole mechanism is transparent to the user. We interface to it with standard IMAP clients. I send plain text email, they receive plain text email but it’s encrypted on the wire over SMTP. The key/certificate/trust management is all handled by the servers. Cert discovery is done via DNS.
it’s an invitation only club, because of the trust infrastructure, but it’s encrypted email and works pretty well. We’re moving a million messages/month on our infrastructure.
But it really solves a lot of the issues that surrounded email encryption.
whartung,
In my opinion I believe email is massively screwed up, with so many hacks and inconsistencies that even something as basic as determining a sender is non-trivial without implementing tons of RFCs that you can’t enforce because other services don’t implement them, etc. As an administrator the whole thing is unpleasant, and as a programmer I’m annoyed because I know we could replace it with better and easier technology today.
But therein lies the problem, I don’t believe commercial interests will be supporting any new federated services in the future, they strongly prefer proprietary ones. Email is the last major widespread federated communications medium of it’s kind and I’d wager it’s never going to get a a major overhaul. Instead we’ll just extend email indefinitely with hacks that only work for select users using the correct software.
I disagree about “select users using the correct software”. E-mail, being as feature-rich as it is, is still surprisingly universal, with most important and critical features being supported among most servers and clients.
Fun thing is that back when they were released you could unify them via standard protocols.
Things went downhill when companies took business into consideration by the fact that they were making money from people actually using their platform.
From technical perspective that is possible even today but profit wise it’s a show stopper.
Facebook Messenger is not even close to what iMessage can do on iOS or a proper email server/client setup, thus having more “pro” features.
It’s just another way to get in touch with people without paying too much taxes..
Have been pressured A LOT, to move to WhatsAPP.
Having both Alphabet and Face-book in the stack I stood on [besides FW and HW “acccidents”], proved too much for my sense of equilibrium.
And a sign about e-mailing still unnecessarily complex.
E-mail should be modularized, also.