Posts Tagged email

So I recently have been trying out the various different terminal based emails clients to see if any of them were suitable to my needs. Sadly I have to report that I have yet to find one that does everything I need of it.

The first client I tried was alpine. I have to say setting up the program and using it was really easy. Adding accounts was a snap and it was decently performing. Sorting into threads was a bit slow but I suspect that was gmails fault. However, alpine falls short in showing me if I have new emails in folders other than the main Inbox or the folder I have open. I didn’t find a quick at a glance type view listing all the folders and an unread count next to them. Bummer, I really need this. I can’t simply open every folder to check if there’s new mail as some of them are very large and take a long time to open. Alpine gets brownie points for being able to use vim as an editor by default, but looks like I need to keep looking.

The next client I tried was cone. Cone seemed very familiar to alpine and was slightly easier to set up and get going, but lacked as many configuration options that alpine had. I also have to say the colorscheme it chose on my urxvt terminal wasn’t exactly pleasing to the eye, but bearable. I was extremely pleased that cone’s folder list did list unread message counts and did almost everything I asked of it. I could even use vim in the place of leaf if I wanted. The wall I hit, however, is deal breaking. It’s not even particularly cone’s fault but from google’s refusal to follow IMAP standards. As such, I cannot mark emails as read when using cone on my gmail IMAP account. Shame, this is all that I found on the net about it. I figured if I could just get cone to fire off \Send when it should have been marked read by gmail anyway would work but I just can’t quite grasp the internals of cone. Sigh. I tried to hack cone’s sourcecode to implement sending UID STORE +FLAGS \Seen but couldn’t get it working. The functions weren’t documented and my knowledge of C was lacking so I was just clobbering things together. I gave up after it would open a message and simply segfault.

Next I attempted to try mutt. Mutt seems overly complicated for my needs and I don’t think it would play very nice with over 5 IMAP accounts. It’s configuration is a nightmare and I gave up after barely just getting one account functioning.

So for now I’m still using Claws-Mail which is the best graphical client I’ve tried so far. There are times when I don’t have access to a graphical display , however, and wanted a nice email client in a terminal which is why I started this search. Would also be handy as I could ssh in from anywhere and read email with a terminal email client.

Now that I’ve wasted half a day stabbing email clients I suppose I should start reading my unread email :/