Right folks. It seems to me that a modern CLI email system for a color would have to be developed from scratch.

At the heart of it would be the ‘editor’, which can do text and HTML the fly, including display images inline. The editor would have to have vi emacs and nano key bindings to accommodate a wide range of personal flavors. And: the viewer needs an attachment integration.

Very importantly, we ALSO need calendaring and tasks!

Then, to draw all this together, we need a customizable main window. This should be a frontend for the ‘editor, display calendaring/tasks, as well as email folders in customizable panes.

So: the existing clients had the various functionalities bolted on over time — or not. But the way forward should be: start with the functions in an integrated way — then put the dedicated frontend on top.

Why not just use elinks / links /lynx and go to gmail.com?

I guess I’m fucked up.. ;-)

I got vim-notmuch up and running and it’s awesome! Best email client I’ve ever used. I’m super impressed by the whole paradigm of having searches and tags rather than mailboxes. I have been working on adding support for URI’s and attachments and just general UI improvements.

There is/was notmuch-vim. And there are also some other tools around notmuch notmuch-fs, alot … so if you are fucked up you can see if you can contribute to these projects and get something you really love…

Don’t forget: google and other webmailers are for free (except your data, that’s transfered to NSA etc.) Webmail is financed by comercials, adds etc. If you don’t find a comfortable e-mail-client – learn programming and create an own one. ;-)

Max

I like to use cli email clients, too. I used to work with OpenXP but there is not much support left for this good old client and so I switched to cone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_(software)). Give it a try…

Also if its just the latency of gmail, you can set it to default to html-only, which is nice for the most part.

Its the customizations and new keybindings I tend to miss with gmail, theres probably labs to deal with this thou.

Bit late too the punch, but if IMAP is being to slow for you, another option (at the cost of disk space) may be to use offlineimap, to download your email to a maildir.

Im lookin at this approach as I want to be able to read email, at anytime where I may not have wifi access or it maybe expensive (airports, buses, my mothers who still has dialup).

It should be pretty portable as I try more clients (mutt, wunderlust, sup being the main ones).

For markdown email, I would add a transform to the composing (in $EDITOR), this would allow you to also view it in a browser before sending.

@ Hamish:
Having read your next post where you mention the mutt IMAP slowness, I thought I should expand a little more.

I use the mutt header_cache and message_cachedir options to speed up large mailboxes, which means I can open my >6000 message INBOX in under 3 seconds (sometimes, the cache fails, but I think that is more because of the stupid Zimbra IMAP server than anything else).

I just checked this on a 13000 message folder and it took about 12seconds to open it the
first time (creating the cache) and under 2 to open it the second time.

Right, let me try and answer this for mutt.

One by one:

1) Folder list in the sidebar

There is a sidebar patch for mutt that is packaged with both debian and ubuntu as part of the “mutt-patched” package. Alternatively – just use the “imap_check_subscribed” as described above.

2) Better attachment management

I have not used pine for decades, so I cannot contrast mutt to your described concerns, but with mutt, I get all these features – there is one standard screen for managing attachments, both for sending and recieving and you can tag and save in bulk to a dir.

3) Email body excerpts

This seemed like it would be a common request and I was assuming that I could just use the “index_format” setting and add an field for the excerpt. But there is no such field. Even if there was, it would not play well with IMAP, since the Subject line is fetched and renderd as a header and the body text would not be available at that time..

4) Some HTML Support

I have this viewing HTML mail working quite well (it is still not perfect, but it is not nearly bad enough for me to build my own renderer)

Install the ‘lynx’ text mode browser
In your ~/.mailcap file, ensure you have a line:

text/html; cat '%s' |perl -pe 's===g' | lynx -assume_charset=utf-8 -dump -stdin; copiousoutput; description=HTML Text; nametemplate=%s.html

The horrid perl is in the middle there because of some wierd rendering links gave to some code review html emails (patches, converted to html!? who wants that!), but I’m resonably sure that it catches and ‘fixes’ other emails often enough to be generally useful
Then add “auto_view text/html” to your ~/.muttrc

Reading your comment again, it looks like you might be more interested in the sending of HTML mail (which I dont do, for all those ‘html mail sucks etc, etc’, reasons) – I’d use a quick wrapper which runs vi, then the markdown commandline tool to do that.