Changes On My Email
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LFA | 2025-11-26 | #software #email #mutt #thunderbird
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A few days ago I switched my mail client from Thunderbird to Mutt[1].
I'm one of those people who still download their mail via POP3, I
don't use IMAP, sorry but no sorry. Call me oldman if you like it but
I prefer to have my things on my own computer rather than on someone
else's and I prefer to have them offline, so for me a mail client is
a very important piece of software. Over the years I've used several
and, if my memory doesn't fail, the two I've used the most have been
Evolution and Thunderbird.

One thing I always liked about Thunderbird is that to move your mail
to a different computer or, even, to a different operating system you
only have to copy a folder from your current computer to the other one
and set up your profile. This is what made me chose Thunderbird at the
time. On the other hand, one of the things I didn't like was that it
had no support for maildir[2]. When support for maildir was added to
Thunderbird I switched all my mail from mbox to it.

I stumbled upon maildir back in 1999 when I did set up my very first
ISP mail server to provide mail to what ended up being more than a
hundred domains and a fairly large number of unlimited email accounts.
At that time, after analysing the needs and requirements, I chose
Qmail[3] + Vpopmail[4] as a mail solution and Qmail used maildir. In
fact it was the creator of Qmail, Daniel J. Bernstein[5], who also
created maildir, and since the beginning I though it was the rigt way
to save email messages.

For those who don't know, maildir is a system in which email messages
are saved as individual files inside physical folders in the computer
file system. This makes it very easy to process mail messages with
different programs because they're just individual text files on your
hard drive. As a proof of the flexibility of maildir, I've been able
to switch all my mail from Thunderbird to Mutt just by copying files
from one place to another on my computer[6], without exporting or
importing anything.

Thunderbird is a full-fledged email client: it connects to the remote
server, it authenticates and downloads (or syncronizes in case of
IMAP) all the mail messages, it pass them through its own spam filter,
through other user-defined filters and finally it displays them in
its viewer. If the message is in HTML format it renders it with its
own HTML renderer, etc. When the user sends an email, it connects to
the remote server, authenticates and send the message. On the other
hand my current mail system is more inline with the UNIX philosophy
(a program does just one thing and does it well), and it also works
without any graphics environment which, for me, is always an added
benefit ;-)

My current email system has 5 main programs:

  - Getmail6[7] to connect to the remote server, get the email
    messages and save them in the right folders on my hard drive.

  - Msmtp[8] to connect to the remote server and send my email
    messages.

  - Emacs-client[9] as a text editor to compose my messages.

  - Mailcap to manage what to do with HTML emails and with different
    file types like pdf documents, images, audios and videos.

  - Mutt the email viewer, manager, and the glue of all these other
    programs.
  
At first this solution could seem a more complex one than having an
all-in-one client like Thunderbird, Evolution, AppleMail, etc., and
probably for regular users without technical interests it is, but for
me it's a much more solid and effective solution. In addition, having
total control over how are managed and processed all the attachements
and HTML messages, which frequently come with tracking, etc., is just
wonderful.

Let's suppose tomorrow I decide to switch my mail to Emacs Mu4e. With
my current setup I have very little to do because Mu4e already uses
maildir, it requires an external program to download the mail messages
and can use msmtp to send them. It would be a surgical change: you
stop running Mutt, you start running Mu4e and everything else stays
the same. You could go back just by running Mutt instead of Mu4e. The
same is true for any other part of this system, I can switch from Emacs
to mg for editing messages and everything else stays the same.

To me the switch form Thunderbird to Mutt has been positive. For those
who are wondering why I chose Mutt rather than NeoMutt, I chose Mutt
because it does everything I need and I also trust much more that the
original project will not introduce modern bullshit like Rust into
its code base.

If you want to know more or share your opinion, you can do it
contacting me by email or Mastodon (take a look at the contact
section in this site).

____________________________________________________________________

[1] http://www.mutt.org/

[2] gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Maildir

[3] http://qmail.org

[4] https://www.inter7.com/vpopmail-virtualized-email/

[5] gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Daniel%20J.%20Bernstein

[6] I had to do it because Thunderbird organizes folders its own
    way and adds other things that I don't need, so I decided
    to create a clean structure and copied the messages to suit
    my preferences.
    
[7] https://getmail6.org/

[8] https://marlam.de/msmtp/

[9] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/