Apr 28 2006
Getting rid of one’s email client addiction
Max just wrote about how much he loves gnus.
It’s interesting to see how much he asserts that he’s dependent on gnus, while I just went in the opposite direction, by stopping using Mutt after almost 9 years of use! I could have written the same article about Mutt a couple of months ago, but my Mutt propaganda page seems very old now.
As I’m a configuration freak, I too invested a lot of time in making sure that my one-and-only mail client was doing exactly what I needed it to do. I had macros, hooks and scripts for every complex operations.
However, I realized when I got a PowerBook that my life in a terminal was a little secluded. I couldn’t integrate with other tools from the OS, click on URLs nor view HTML messages other than by looking at a text dump easily.
So, as I moved my personal domain to DreamHost, I decided to start from scratch, expose my email by IMAP - it already was the case before, but it was complex as it was mixed with work email on the same machine - and try the stock clients that my environment gave me. KDE provided me with Kmail, OSX provided me with Mail.app, and DreamHost has SquirrelMail installed as a Web mail for each domain.
So I tweaked my spam filtering slightly to work independently from adjustments I was making from inside Mutt, changed the way I was dealing with archived mail, and I now have the feeling that wherever I am, in a cyber-café, on my Mac, on my PC, or even on my PDA, I have the best interface I can get.
And I really have the feeling that I’m free: I got rid of my Mutt addiction.
Sure, I lost some of the power of Mutt (I haven’t figured out how to reply to several messages at once neither in Mail.app nor in KMail yet), but as Michael Elkins said in 1995: All mail clients suck.
April 28th, 2006 at 17:22
Good points. I didn’t want to go into the details of my complex setup, but I should still mention that it is also exposed as IMAP folders on the server and so I sometimes use other clients like a webmail interface in a cybercafé, or my mobile phone’s email client, or even mutt. It doesn’t happen so often, so I would still consider myself “addicted” to gnus, since I rarely feel the need to try out new clients.
The problem I see with using several IMAP clients is that you can only rely on the intersection of each client’s supported features. Last time I checked, it wasn’t big enough for me, but maybe
things are different now and IMAP support is better across clients.