With all respect for the hard work done on this client, but is it just me or is the TUI getting too much attention recently??

I think the GUI stacks are too bloated or too hideous (electron, cpp/qt,c# and it's limitations, etc...) to work with these days so much that the cool kids (hardcore techy people) just gave up and started doing TUIs to solve their own problems directly?

I'm still using Thunderbird, which is barely maintained for a decent standalone IMAP client - it's beginning to feel pretty ridiculous. I was having some search issues the other day and I looked at alternatives - the options were basically Outlook, Claws Mail which is ugly as sin, eM Client which is Windows only and Mailspring which actually looked pretty good... right up until it asked me to make an account for use with my own IMAP servers - no thanks.

I didn't think this was a big ask but I guess now that most people just use a single Gmail account the market for such things is dwindling. Here I sit with 7 accounts in Thunderbird. Maybe I'm just going to be stuck with eM Client or Outlook and using RDP to check my email. I'm willing to pay, someone please give me a decent cross platform alternative with a GUI, ideally a proper, non-electron one.

The TUI clients I've looked at all seem to suffer from some mix of:

- Poor mail notifications

- Poor multi-account support

- Single maintainer that could disappear at any time

- Archaic keybindings, or perhaps I'm just too lazy to learn them

- HTML mail is used widely now as most people use webmail and just doesn't map well to console applications

Overall when I want my mail client to "just work" I've found them to be piss poor compared to Thunderbird. Which is beginning to seem rather silly, but it's still my experience.

I don't know what to do. Maybe I should fork Mailspring, strip out the account garbage and just tolerate Electron, but that'd create a whole bunch of maintenance work I just can't take on right now.

I'd really recommend you take another look at Mutt, or Alpine if you're more into pico/nano than vim as editors. It's the best tool I can think of for dealing with large quantities of mail.

* Notifications can be configured to do pretty much whatever you want (by invoking a command when new mail arrives)

* Multi-account support works well (currently have it hooked up to my personal and work accounts simultaneously)

* Developed by a community

* The visual component of HTML mail is irrelevant 99% of the time. A reasonable textual interpretation can be generated by piping the message through `w3m --dump`, a process which can happen automatically inside mutt when viewing those messages with no action required on your part. If you absolutely must see the formatted message with images and such, this is only a keystroke away.

There's a lot of initial configuration to do, granted, but you only need to do it once. Then you stick your mutt directory up on github or similar, and never need to do it again. Setting up a new or different machine is a clone away.

You can learn the initial keybinds in a couple hours (it's a lot simpler than vim), and I think you'll be blown away once you get proficient at it.

This may be a bit extreme, but after many years, I think all GUI mail clients suck. Email is primarily a textual medium at the end of the day.

That, and Mutt's the only thing I can think of where the expected features of a mail client work with reliability. Putting up with Thunderbird's speed/stability or Outlook's stability/searching isn't something we should have to do in 2019.

I think I will do that.

> Notifications can be configured to do pretty much whatever you want (by invoking a command when new mail arrives)

My understanding was that was pretty trivial to have going using notify-send and aplay

https://neomutt.org/feature/new-mail

> Multi-account support works well (currently have it hooked up to my personal and work accounts simultaneously)

Admittedly when I looked at it was pre neomutt days, I seem to remember there being a special sidebar patch that upstream refused to use.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPiQuWbF57M Mutt Wizard Published on Apr 25, 2019

In that video he demonstrates a loose script that he's developed https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard, it might be a good way for me to dip my feet in it and learn about all the components.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvc-pHjbhdE he did a video on calcurse too..

Sorry for the gaudy 4chan-style meme stuff. That's not my thing either but the videos are very succinct and he seems to be a good speaker.

> Developed by a community

Yes, this important to me and more likely to make me help out.

> The visual component of HTML mail is irrelevant 99% of the time. A reasonable textual interpretation can be generated by piping the message through `w3m --dump`, a process which can happen automatically inside mutt when viewing those messages with no action required on your part. If you absolutely must see the formatted message with images and such, this is only a keystroke away.

Very true, most of the email i receive is plain text, sometimes its not, but with minimal formatting. Theoretically it should be possible to view these HTML emails in Firefox should it not?

> There's a lot of initial configuration to do, granted, but you only need to do it once. Then you stick your mutt directory up on github or similar, and never need to do it again. Setting up a new or different machine is a clone away.

This.... the main reason I like plaintext configs.