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I couldn't agree more, and for the same reasons you've mentioned I end up coming back to Thunderbird, even though I'd like a TUI client.

I looked at this video about mutt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jMInHnpNfQ which made me think about making a switch.

However can we really do better than Mutt. Mutt typically had issues with multiple accounts and moving emails between the two. I have been migrating away from Google and this is a handy ability (which thunderbird has). I was quite excited by Drew Devault's aerc client https://drewdevault.com/2019/06/03/Announcing-aerc-0.1.0.htm... so maybe that or meli might be the solution for me.

Really there are only 3 requirements for me:

* Be able to use Vim for editing (one of my major gripes in Thunderbird

* Be able to use markdown, ideally something like pandoc, in thunderbird I use Markdown Here https://markdown-here.com but that requires you to edit in rich text mode and then convert to markdown. This is really annoying because you end up with <br> and <p> in the wrong places and have to always convert back to "Body Text".

* Be able to sync my contacts from CardDav. I could not go back to having a non-centralized address book. Ideally such a client would benefit from https://www.etesync.com/ as well

* Calendars I don't think need to strictly be in a mail client. What's the usecase for that? MacOSX has Mail.app and iCal.app separate. Is this a hangover from the Outlook/Google design. https://www.calcurse.org looks pretty healthy, though they say their CalDav support is experimental.

* PGP support, WKD, OPENPGPKEY, AutoCrypt etc. Enigmail does a lot of things right.




Just looking at the requirements of both of you shows how hard it is to make a decent mail client.


Your needs would line up pretty well with switching to emacs/evil, orgmode and then one of the 3 good email clients.

Just remember its there when you are ready for it ;)


I’ve never really had issues with mutt: the lack of notifications is, from my perspective, a good thing because it means that I’ll handle mail on my own schedule rather than as it comes.

As far as multi-account goes, though, it’s relatively easy to setup in mutt, using something like isync and mu for archiving and searching.




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