Ask HN: Is the state of mail user agents that sad?

For email automation I have written a lightweight CLI in Rust [1] which supports MIME and SMTP. I'm currently integrating sendmail's capabilities as well, so that it can be used both as a MUA (message user agent) and MTA (message transfer agent). Cargo's feature flags will hopefully give you a UNIX-like experience (only compile the features you want to use).

In general, I share your sentiment. Email is still the best protocol to contact people outside of your organization. It's a pitty that encrypted email somehow haven't prevailed. The matrix protocol might be better suited for standardized and encrypted communication.

I would argue that every citizen should get a state-issued email address which then can be used for official communication with public authorities (signing and encrypting being a prerequisite). In Germany, you still get so much paper via regular mail. Even the ten-page Covid-19 quarantine order is send by post. It only arrives when quarantine is already over. (Admittedly, you get this order by phone, too, and they are asking for your email address.)

[1] https://github.com/quambene/pigeon-rs

1. They would have to install, maintain, backup and configure themselves 2. Has a reasonable web application, that, as a major perk, they don't have to install, maintain, backup and configure themselves

Due to the lack of demand for such a product, I am not surprised the existing products arn't polished/well maintained.

The idea is keep the identity registry on a blockchain, so your identity cannot be taken away from you. Messages between users are always encrypted, in transit or at rest. We also have a gateway that allows you to use the system as a regular email, and proxy server that translates our internal API (protobufs, gRPC) to the legacy email protocols, SMTP/POP3/IMAP.

https://ubikom.cc

https://notmuchmail.org/

>This whole idea of a self-contained MUA application goes against the general UNIX-y paradigm

I don't understand this at all, or your concerns about buffer overflows and "quickly testing hypotheses regarding MUA design." Text-based MUAs in particular are very solid and fast; find one you like and quit worrying about irrelevant issues. Or, learn Emacs and use one of the mail clients it supports (or write your own!).

—signed, former tech support for Z-Mail and text-based Z-Mail Lite

The workflow is ok. I get a large amount of email that I can just delete, and it's particularly nice to be able to select a bunch of cron emails with a regular expression.

In the last year it's become unreliable. When I move a message from one folder to another, it doesn't stay moved. I guess it's some error handling problem. I have lots of emails in some folders (10k).

I have thought about writing a driver for mutt that works directly against the Google API instead of IMAP, but writing REST code in C would be a slog.

* it should be able to work offline (with a dedicated send/receive cycle),

* it should run fine on a Raspberry Pi (out of principle more than anything),

* it should favor plaintext mail,

* it should integrate well with all kinds of workflows and platforms (such as git email),

* it should be a veritable platform for experimentation (i.e., it should be malleable).

I think the case can be made that re-inventing the wheel can sometimes be beneficial. And e-mail to me seems rather 'underexposed' (maybe because most people think it has been a solved problem since at least Gmail).

Undeniably, yes.

Personally, I still use the last real version of Eudora (7.1.0.9) along with a patch that gives it support for modern security (full TLSv1.2, LE root certs, etc).

I use it at home and at work, with over 20 years of email history in each one. I simply cannot find anything that does what it does as well...

Handles over 1 million messages with ease

Nice filtering rules

Super fast search tool

Files aren't stored in some inaccessible binary store

Keeps attachments stored externally from mailboxes

Makes it easy to manage multiple addresses & accounts

Very plain-text friendly

Has limited image/HTML support & doesn't run javascript (security though inability :) )

etc etc etc

This isn't something we can overcome with a purely technical solution. The basic ideas behind end to end encrypted messaging will eventually have to be made part of our culture.

It was a nice distraction, then I realized that I only spend a few minutes each week reading email. It's just not a significant part of my workflow, either professionally or personally.

I have had mu4e set up for about a year, but I didn't feel comfortable in it, often reverting to the web clients instead, which was miserable. Recently I spent (many) hours making it really my own, and _my god_ what an amazing experience!

I have all my accounts in the same view (if I want). I have filters for everything. I can say "follow up" with 2 keystrokes, which will open up a calendar, allow me to pick a date, then the email will be automatically archived and I will not see anything about it until that date in my org-agenda. I use org-msg to compose these Outlook-style email for work (except I can easily quote, post syntax highlighted code, even with the real results embeded, etc).

I have 2-letter shortcuts to quickly cut down to the sender domain, the email FROM: address, everything from this address sent only to me, a filter for finding everything that looks like this subject.. I even have 2 letter shortcuts to fire up a browser with this Message-ID and open it (dynamic based on account) directly in the webclient (unless you are MS [1] who for some reason uses POST for their searches. I hack around it by adding a precise query to my clipboard). I don't often use this, but it can be handy.

This is all synced using isync. I have two systemd unit files. One which does the inbox-related stuff often, and another full sync which runs every hour if I recall correctly.

Finally, since this is all locally, search is instant. And since it is in emacs, I use all my normal shortcuts and everything.

I have finally been able to achieve inbox zero, something I never have before.

It took a lot of effort to get here, but I love it. Something really amazing would have to come along to displace my workflow, and I don't see that happening. notmuch is another option, which has tags support (mu4e does not). That is the only thing I miss in mu4e. However notmuch stores the tags in a local database which is not easily shared, so for now I am super happy with mu4e. And I often capture the email in org-mode anyway, which does support tags.

Most of the config for this in on github [2] (I still have some things to commit), if you are interested.

Waiting for tags to be stored in X-headers of the email reliably..

[1]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/outlk_...

[2]: https://github.com/bergheim/dotfiles/blob/3cb1540f57f391beb2...