Wanted: Commandline/Curses IMAP-aware Mail Client

OK: for “real” e-mail, I persist in using the Rand Mail Handler – MH, now in its guise as NMH, with an EXMH frontend that has made life more pleasant since GUIs became common / XMH got too clunky.

Why?

Because it fits the Unix “toolkit” approach, and allows me to manipulate the vast quantity of e-mail that someone who has had the same mail address since 1992 will perforce receive. Also: in a pinch I can drive it from the commandline, using a trivial wrapper-script that I have had in several incarnations since, ooh, 1989?

However: for low-volume e-mail accounts I use Mail.app on MacOS, which although pretty is not really runnable over a slow 256k DSL link, regardless of how good Chicken of the VNC is.

So: I would like a IMAP-aware command-line mailclient, and – eschewing my other compute environment – I would like it not to be written in Elisp/EMACS unless it truly is a thin IMAP client, rather than some suck it down from the mail server, coersce it into RMAIL format, store it on disk, har har my pretty you’ll not see that IMAP server again, M-x set-current-message M-x advance-message-pointer C-h C-h ~ Z disconnect-from-imap-server abomination.

I have, in a previous life, used ELM. I found it usable, but annoying how it dealt with the distinction between read/unread mail.

What’s out there nowadays?

Comments

11 responses to “Wanted: Commandline/Curses IMAP-aware Mail Client”

  1. Chris Adams
    re: Wanted: Commandline/Curses IMAP-aware Mail Client

    mutt (http http://www.mutt.org) works well with IMAP over SSL here.

  2. alecm
    re: Wanted: Commandline/Curses IMAP-aware Mail Client

    would that be “uses IMAP as a backing store / for mail storage”, or more like “sucks stuff of IMAP servers and stores it locally” ?

  3. Luis Peralta
    re: Wanted: Commandline/Curses IMAP-aware Mail Client

    It can do both. Please give it a try, you will be impressed. The learning curve for advanced usage is not that hard when you are coming from an elm world…

  4. alecm
    re: Wanted: Commandline/Curses IMAP-aware Mail Client

    mmmm – I have it compiled and am looking at it now. That the sample .muttrc is 3300_ lines long is scarey. 😎

    What immediately worries me is that my hosting services’s IMAP server is qmail/vpopmail-based, and I am concerned that where the IMAP folder syntax is:

    imap <username>@<host.domain>:<port>/<folder>

    …I fear it will break horribly when I set “username” to be “webmaster@cryptcide.com” as vpopmail requires… I have not yet worked up either the nerve, or the necessary syntax, to see what happens and how to escape the extra @.

    I wonder if Qmail / vpopmail will be happy with %64 ASCII encoding?

  5. alecm
    @-sign happiness

    yay – it works, and does the right thing with the twin @-signs.

    now i have to work out how to create a list of virtual folders that I can cycle around without typing-in reams of cack.

  6. xencat
    re: @-sign happiness

    Mutt, definately. (PINE if you’re perverse 😉 )

  7. Stephen Usher
    re: Wanted: Commandline/Curses IMAP-aware Mail Client

    The latest version of Elm does IMAP. Then there’s, of course, Pine as well.

  8. Christopher Davis
    Try Gnus

    Gnus does IMAP quite well, in my experience; it’s my primary client and works nicely in XEmacs. The nnimap backend works properly, not pulling over the whole spool or anything silly like that.

  9. Anand Buddhdev
    re: Wanted: Commandline/Curses IMAP-aware Mail Client

    You might want to look at Cone. It’s a relative new-comer in the field of console-based email clients, but is quite nice in many ways. It’s not as powerful as mutt. On the other hand, its interface is simple, and does the job well. Its author is Sam Varshavchik, whom you might recognise as the author of the well-known courier-imap. Cone’s IMAP support is excellent (perhaps the best I have seen). It keeps a local index of your IMAP folders, and these indexes only need updating when folders actually change. So it’s very fast, even over slow links. Give it a whirl.

    http http://www.courier-mta.org/cone/book.html

  10. Jon
    Mutt vs Pine vs …

    Mutt’s IMAP support will get on your nerves if you have folders with large amounts of mail in them, as it re-downloads the full headers frome every folder as soon as you change into it. Pine , while not being open source or Free, at least only grabs the current screenful’s worth of info, and is reasonably quick at it, although it requires a lot of dinking around with your config options to make it behave the way you like (Such as listing each folder both as a target, and subfolder, so you could have a folder Foo with messages, that also has a subfolder Bar.

  11. Unknown

    If you are using mutt, take a look at the sidebar ( Folderlist ) patch for mutt at http://www.lunar-linux.org/index.php?page=mutt-sidebar

    I am using mutt now. I had been using cone before, but it does not seem to work well with some mail servers, like dovecot. Works fine with a courier-imap server though.

    If anybody has a link to a good pinerc, pls paste it 🙂

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