back to mutt

By anders pearson 12 Sep 2003

a couple weeks ago, i did a system update on my workstation. among the software updated was <a href=”http://www.mutt.org/“>mutt</a>, my email client of choice. something was fishy with the new version (1.5.1) and it no longer wanted to talk to columbia’s imap server.

for fun, i decided i’d try out a few of the other mail clients available. from past experience, i’ve concluded that it is a bad idea to dismiss any open source software that you haven’t tried out in the last couple months. often, bugs are fixed and features added at an astonishing rate and any complaints you may have had will have vanished. an application that was completely unusable a few months ago may have suddenly blossomed into something best of breed.

i’ve been a happy mutt user from some time now so i hadn’t bothered really looking at the other available linux mail clients. mutt has a reputation for being extremely customizable, but it is a text-based client and pretty old-school in its design.

i have some very special requirements for mail clients. most importantly, i <a href=”http://www.gnupg.org/“>GPG</a> sign all of my email (in this age of <a href=”http://www.consumer.gov/idtheft/“>identity theft</a> and knowing how painfully easy it is to forge email headers, not signing my email is absolutely not an option. i would argue that the same is true for most other people who use email but i seem to be in the minority with that opinion), so i need a mail client with good support for encryption. luckily, on linux this now means most email clients.

columbia’s network admins are fairly paranoid (a good thing) so the client has to be able to connect to imap over ssl/tls and send through authenticated smtp. again, this doesn’t seem to be a problem with most linux clients.

i’ve used emacs for years and learned all the basic keyboard shortcuts by heart. actually, i’ve learned them too well. most of the applications that i use on a regular basis also support the emacs keybindings so i’ve developed the habit of using C-p, C-n, C-f, C-b in place of the arrow keys and C-a and C-e for Home and End. this is good because it’s really efficient; my fingers barely have to leave the home row. unfortunately, some other software uses those keybindings for different actions. eg, i have a very hard time using just about <em>anything</em> on windows because everytime i want to go up a line, i hit C-p and windows apps invariably pop up a print dialog. i really can’t emphasize enough how annoying it is to try to type any large amount of text using the arrow keys to move the cursor when you’re used to emacs style. so support for emacs keybindings in one way or another is fairly important for me.

the apps i tried out this time around: <a href=”http://kmail.kde.org/“>kmail</a>, <a href=”http://www.ximian.com/products/evolution/“>evolution</a>, and <a href=”http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/“>mozilla thunderbird</a>.

before i settled on mutt last time, i had tried out kmail and i remember not being too pissed off at it. so i gave it another try.

the good: decent support for encryption (it doesn’t fully support <a href=”http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2015.txt”>PGP/Mime</a>. PGP/Mime requires that the signature be in an attached file, kmail puts everything inline. some people prefer that (because Outlook on windows does stupid things when it receives PGP signature attachments), but i like standards, dammit. the <a href=”http://www.gnupg.org/aegypten/“>&#196;gypten</a> project should change this.). kmail allows you to use an external editor for composing messages, so keybindings are a non-issue (i just tell it to use emacs as my editor). it also is a generally nice looking app, integrates well with kde’s addressbook, and allows me to completely disable html email (email should be plaintext, the way god intended it).

the bad: kmail’s imap support seems like an afterthought. there’s no way to specify that an imap INBOX should be the main inbox. so when you start up the program, you then have to go through the additional step of selecting the imap INBOX. there’s also no way of telling it that you only want it to check certain imap folders for new messages. i subscribe to a few mailing lists which are automatically filtered out into their own folders. i also have dozens more folders where i store old messages. whenever kmail checks for new messages, it seems to go through the entire, huge directory of folders, which takes it about 2 minutes (and the rest of the interface blocks while it is doing that). i normally have my email client set to check for new messages every 10 minutes or so. with kmail, that would mean that it would be unusable 20% of the time, so i had to set it to 30 minutes or so.

the good: full PGP/Mime support. having a calendar, task manager, and addressbook integrated right into the email client really is nice. i wouldn’t have believed it, but i like it now. it lets me set my imap INBOX as the main INBOX and only subscribe to certain folders.

the bad: no ability to specify an external editor and no support for emacs bindings. it even has C-p bound to ‘Print’ so it causes the same problem as windows for me. luckily, GTK2 (the GUI library that it was written in) allows for easy rebinding of keys. i couldn’t figure out how to get it to actually support emacs keys, but i could at least rebind “Print” to something less problematic. also, while i could tell it to only subscribe to certain folders, there was no way of accessing any other folders without subscribing to them as well. eg, i couldn’t save a message to one of the folders that i wasn’t subscribed to.

the <a href=”http://www.mozilla.org/“>mozilla</a> suite started out as a combined web-browser, email client, html editor, chat client, etc. and has recently broken up into specialized components all using the same core libraries and technologies. <a href=”http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firebird/“>Mozilla Firebird</a> is my prefered browser so i figured i’d also check out Thunderbird.

the good: light, fast, well designed interface. there is even a Bayesian spam filter built right into it. very cool.

the bad: unfortunately, the <a href=”http://enigmail.mozdev.org/“>enigmail</a> component which allows for PGP/GPG integration hasn’t been updated to work with the newer Thunderbird releases on linux. it works fine in the mozilla mail client bundled with the full mozilla releases. unfortunately, if i try to run that mail client, i can’t seem to also run Mozilla Firebird as my browser; it forces me to use the older version of mozilla. there also is no support for using emacs as an editor or emacs keybindings. i think there’s a way to rebind keys in thunderbird, but without GPG support, it wasn’t worth the time for me to figure it out.

i’m crochety and way too picky when it comes to email programs.

no. email is one of the main applications i use. for something that i use that frequently and depend on so much, i won’t accept anything less than perfect, and i refuse to feel bad about having high standards.

for me, there was really no other choice but to go back to mutt 1.4.1. i miss the integrated calendar of evolution and the smooth built in bayesian spam filter of thunderbird, but that’s about it. if i had to live without mutt, i would probably choose kmail. if it improves its imap and PGP/Mime support, i may yet. similarly, if evolution or thunderbird improve their imap integration and let me use emacs as an editor, i would also be tempted to switch.

for anyone else who doesn’t have the same requirements as me, i would heartily recommend at least taking a close look at any of the above (thunderbird is even available on other platforms).

Tags: usability review email clients