Thoughts on Mutt and email

I managed to get myself to configure Mutt in the past few days.

A Bit of History

I am from around the generation where email turned largely into an ad serving and cooperate noticeboard platform rather than a digital communication platform. I did use email for it's original purpose when I was around ten years old. At first it was the only digital way to communicate with one of two friends I had at the time, as we weren't aware of any chat platforms (it would be interesting to see how I would be different had I grown up with something like IRC or XMPP). That was still using Gmail's default web mail interface. I remember having a conversation over email with a teacher which ended in him recommending I consider going to bed as it was 10am and I still had to go to school after that.

Then a few more years later, I got a Nokia phone. My main method of digital communication with my friends stayed at email, but my communication with my parents moved over to SMS. A few years and a lot of nagging later, I got them to buy me a Motorola Moto G 4G; still have it somewhere with LineageOS on it, think the batteries are dead though. This was the time where pretty much all of my communication moved over to WhatsApp and email became my "cooperations, feel free to toss your advertisements in my general direction" platform. Occasionally I still used email for school related things such as handing in homework.

Fast forward another few years and I have become quite aware of how the cooperate structure of the modern world functions and have made quite the effort so far to ditch most of the standard services people use. I have ditched WhatsApp in favor of Signal and managed to get my friends to use Signal as well, a choice which I am slowly starting to regret seeing the direction Signal is going with it's recent crypto currency support, but that can of worms warrants a completely separate poorly thought out post. Until recently, email had been mostly left by the way side, it mostly being used to ignore 90% of the ads I get, keep track of the receipts of digitally bought goods and legally downloading free music off of Bandcamp.

Mutt

My dad had mentioned that he tried Mutt a long time ago and that he hated it for not really doing all that much out of the box (and probably the vi esque bindings, he's an Emacs user). I had also come across Luke Smith and him mentioning that Mutt in a nightmare to configure by hand, to the point where he has created a program called mutt-wizard. But then Mutt got mentioned on an episode of Trendy Talk (I forget which) by Drew as being perfect, but taking 18 months to configure. I have used Thunderbird for about a year now, ranging from the end of my Windows days to almost-present-at-time-of-writing (2021-05-03 02:42:16.119177494+02:00), but I never really liked it. Sure, it got the job done, and the RSS feed is a neat touch (this'll probably come across as heresy). But it being as heavy as it is has prevented me from installing it on anything but my beefiest PC (don't get any products of the HP Omen line). So I decided to bite the bullet and see what all the fuss was about. And you know what, I don't think Mutt is really all that difficult to get the hang of. Sure, it requires quite some time be put in understanding the underlying concepts that make Mutt tick, but once you've got a basic config set up, you're pretty much good to go.

Whats more interesting - and the entire reason I decided to write this blob of text in the first place - is that I all of a sudden have a lot of fun digging through old emails and deleting a significant portion of those aforementioned ads. It's managed to make email as a concept fun again for me. I think it's because I can finally write my emails in Vim, combined with it being _my_ email environment, _I_ put the time into making it work for _me_. It's not some generic configuration that does what it needs to reasonably well. As a result of all the tinkering that has gone into making it work, it's satisfying just to even start it up and see it work, knowing that I put in the effort to get it to behave like I want it to. Meanwhile in Thunderbird my experience consisted of following the steps in the config wizard to set up my various email accounts and that's about it. Maybe some small things like enabling quick search.

I also find myself bugging everyone I know who has an email address they check every once in a while, just so I can do something else then scroll through old emails for the Nth time in 6 hours.

Now the next challenge for me is it set up an email server... How difficult could that be...

Closing remark

So all in all, consider this my recommendation to check out Mutt, or NeoMutt (don't ask me about the differences yet...) if you're a bit weird and have come to regard email as a legacy digital communication medium. It might spark your enjoyment for the medium again.

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