Community Matters

I have used so many of them. The original Berkeley mail. Then elm, pine, vm (under Xemacs) and finally mutt. Those are all text console based and (at the risk of getting myself flamed here) are sorted in order of usefulness - with mutt clearly superior to the rest. They work exceptionally well if you don’t get a lot of HTML emails and if you don’t expect seamless integration of pictures, rich text documents and other attachments. Which, btw, until only a few years ago, meant they worked very well with the vast majority of email.

I also was exposed to the frightening class of gui-based email programs. The distressing Lotus Notes (which back then didn’t even speak the most basic Internet email protocols correctly - allegedly that’s fixed now). The utterly frightening Outlook Express. The omnipresent Outlook (which is not terrible as far as gui-based email programs go, but has all of their shortcomings that I’ll get to in a moment). Right now I use Entourage for work email - which in many ways is nicer than Outlook (for example, it runs on OS X and is reasonably well integrated into that which gives it a nice touch compared to Outlook), but in other ways worse (as it competes with Outlook, is from the same small software company in Redmond, WA, and still isn’t able to fully integrate with that same company’s Exchange server - how ridiculous is that? Entourage doesn’t understand MAPI and instead uses WebDAV to talk to Exchange - which simply takes a lot of potential features away).

And it’s sad to say, there’s a group of programs that’s even worse - the open source gui email programs (like Evolution, Thunderbird or Kmail). Why am I so negative? Well, they compete with Outlook and they don’t come even close. None of them can really integrate with the Exchange calendar (Evolution tries to but fails badly). None of them has a gui that’s even close to what Outlook or Entourage have to offer. They are slow (try using them with a 250MB mailbox under Exchange) and are simply hard to use - even allowing for the fact that gui-clients in general are bad for email…

Here, I said it again… so why do I dislike gui-clients so much when it comes to email? Simple. If you are dealing with a lot of email (and who isn’t, given the spam pandemic) then the number one task of an email client is to allow you to quickly sort, view and discard email based of a variety of criteria. Mail thread boring? Delete all emails in it. Mail author annoying you? Gone are his emails. Which other emails have I received from this person? Which emails where the subject contains the word “blog”?

Sure, you can do all of these with the gui programs. But that requires you to touch the mouse. Bzzzzt. Disqualified. If I get to an inbox with 400 new messages since yesterday evening (not unusual) I don’t have the time to keep moving from keyboard to mouse and back.

But let’s say for the sake of argument that there was a gui client that had a decent keyboard interface. That still leaves you with the problem that it will try to render all the stuff that people send you. Which is fine for the 5% of your email that you actually want to read in detail. And for the rest it is at best a waste (and with Outlook on Windows, often quite dangerous).

“But it’s so easy to use the gui clients!”, I hear you say. Yep, for the occasional or newby user. But once you spent some time with your email client (and again, this whole posting assumes that you get a serious amount of email - so you’ll be there soon enough) then all what makes the gui clients so easy to use at first now makes them even more annoying.

Yes, for people who love to send pictures or other embedded objects around to others, mutt is not as pretty. And the learning curve is steep. But I think it’s worth it. I use it every day for all my email at hohndel.org and just love it. Even though I read those email on Macs these days which means I’d have access to Mail.app - one of the better gui-clients out there. But a good text based mailer like mutt beats Mail.app for large volumes of email, any time.

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