You just used the word “simply” in the same was as you used the word “just”.
The argument GP was making is that what is obvious to one reader may not be obvious to another. So using the words “simply” or “just” or “obviously” does not add information, except to signal that you feel the reader is ignorant if they are not aware of what you’re explaining.
My PhD advisor always crossed these words out of my scientific writing, and I think it was a good change to make.
Strangely, that's entirely the opposite of what I understood from the original comment. To me, "you can just use XXX" sounds like someone just told me that "all you need is XXX; don't worry it's simple". The assumption is that the HN'er saying it and the HN'er being said to share an implicit level of expertise since we are all talking about mutt here.
Fair point. It does probably make sense to just strip the words out in this case as well.
I do want to point out that I didn't use those words fully consciously and I most certainly did not mean to imply the reader was ignorant. The only thing those words were signalling is that the action in question does not take much effort (once you know it).
> The argument GP was making is that what is obvious to one reader may not be obvious to another.
Regardless of the argument, it's not obvious to anyone unless they've taken the time to read the documentation and possibly read through some examples. While there are those who may feel that it's simple and/or obvious after they have gained that knowledge, it shouldn't relieve anyone of the responsibility to read documentation and figure these things out for any tool that they use.
For anyone currently using a GUI mail client where HTML mail works out of the box, this is not something they will spend time figuring out before concluding that HTML mails just don't work. And this is a complete non-starter for those who like Mutt on the basis of having something that also works in non-graphical environments.
That's fair enough, but this is why I'm not recommending this to someone who is not willing to spend half a minute searching for this one-liner. I'd also wager that the intersection of such people with the people who would even consider using Mutt in the first place is basically empty.
My point is that if you don't have those two constraints, it's trivial to do and it works perfectly.
That's fine when you run mutt on your local machine, but the whole reason to use mutt is so that you have a dedicated email machine that you can ssh into and use screen to access email from anywhere. And then things like this become 10x harder (I never found a way, although last I tried was 15+ years ago). Attachments, too.
That's certainly a valid reason to use mutt, but this is not at all why I use. I use because I prefer keyboard control, customizability and a simple, clean UI. Also because it's actually the least sucky (IMO) of local email clients.
One of my main reasons for using Mutt is precisely the opposite: with mbsync I have copies of all emails on my laptop, so I can read, search, and compose emails when I don't have an internet connection.
Why would anyone use mutt when you can have 'local' (ie on a machine you ssh into) Maildirs? That's one of the selling points for using mutt. Imap sucks, it's just something we have to put up with for lack of something better, but I've never searched mail as fast as when I could just grep for what I needed.
I use Thunderbird and it's installed on multiple machines where I have it configured to access the same email account via IMAP. I never really had a problem with out of sync mail and searches are done locally on the machine rather than on the server. I don't have it configured to use Maildir, but the files that store messages are in plain text and I could use grep on them if I wanted to.
You probably don't want to risk the attack surface of a full browser by default. You can use something like this:
text/html; lynx -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput
The real problem though is not preserving the rich-text-ness of the quoted message when replying, and the inability to have inline images. I use Outlook at work and mutt for private email. Using mutt at work just wouldn’t be practical, as the text markup and inline images are often critical to the exchange.
On a related note, while I love the UX of mutt, I do find proportional fonts to be significantly more readable than fixed-width fonts for paragraphs of natural-language text.
> The real problem though is not preserving the rich-text-ness of the quoted message when replying,
Given the near ubiquitous use of top-posting and quoting the entire message that's being replied to, it stands to reason that others are not really reading the quoted material and are just reading the response on top.
> and the inability to have inline images
I wonder when email clients like Outlook would start rendering images based on a URL included in the message, similar to what Slack does. That could allow one to effectively include an inline image, which would be seen as a URL in other clients.
The quoted material is important, because people expect to be able to retrace the conversation within the single message. Technical (and also nontechnical) exchanges often consist of a dozen messages about a particular topic spread over weeks or sometimes months, where at almost each step you want to go back in the conversation to look at details of the previous discussion or to refresh your memory. Outlook users are used to doing so by scrolling through the message. They are generally not used to having to bring up the correct previous message -- Outlook also doesn't have a great UX for that.
> The quoted material is important, because people expect to be able to retrace the conversation within the single message.
Given the proliferation of rendering a thread of messages and showing them as a conversation (i.e., conversation view), reading the quoted material within the same message is not really necessary.
> Technical (and also nontechnical) exchanges often consist of a dozen messages about a particular topic spread over weeks or sometimes months, where at almost each step you want to go back in the conversation to look at details of the previous discussion or to refresh your memory.
While I have seen this done in threads where people follow the conventions of a typical mailing list or usenet newsgroup by replying inline and quoting only parts of the text they're responding to, I have not seen the equivalent in a threaded conversation in outlook. And, as you note:
> Outlook also doesn't have a great UX for that.
While they have addressed the UX issue to some extent with the conversation view, it still doesn't really lend itself to easily following the discussion amongst multiple people due to the fact that they don't typically use different subthreads under the same email chain.
I avoid that by replying inline, discarding the history of multiple-quoted emails from top-repliers. Everybody else uses Outlook, but nobody has yet complained.
For sending emails with formatting (italics, headings), I use Markdown in Vim then press H in Mutt before sending, which pipes it through an appropriate filter:
set send_multipart_alternative_filter=html_alternative
send-hook . 'set send_multipart_alternative=no'
macro compose H ':set send_multipart_alternative=yes<Enter><view-alt-mailcap>' 'add HTML alternative'
I do the same, mutt for personal email and web browser based for others (usually work provided email). I always keep work and private emails separate and correct people when they try to intermingle them (know me in RL as well as at work)
I use mutt a lot, and that's what I do when some HTML content is not viewable in the terminal but unless I'm missing something it's one of the areas where HTML-aware clients actually fare better, both in convenience and privacy/security.
For instance if I open some marketing email I got in the ProtonMail web client I
get a warning that "This message contains remote content" with the option to
allow it. Before that my browser makes no query to any third-party website so
nobody can track it.
If I open the same email in firefox from mutt, firefox immediately fetches the remote
content normally and unconditionally.
You could probably script something to start a browser in offline mode but I
haven't seen most people do it (see the replies in this thread that just tell
people to "open HTML with Firefox"). So paradoxically mutt users might be easier
to track than ProtonMail, GMail and other HTML-aware webmail users.
That's true, though I avoid this problem by only opening HTML email from known, trusted senders where I consider it acceptable to signal that I opened the email.
Unfortunately even "trusted" senders I know often like to use third-parties to handle tracking and analytics and from there you don't really know where it's going to end up.
Of course you might argue that I shouldn't trust people using these services but then I might as well stop using the internet altogether.
