I am a researcher, and when my colleagues want to discuss results they have the nasty habit of sending plots and documents as email attachments. My most important emails have PDF documents or plots attached, with the email text commenting the attachment itself. The problem with mutt is that it allows you to start helper supporting application to open attachments, but it waits for the application to finish before returning to the email text. This is not what I want, for I obviously have to read the email and view the attachment at the same time!

The usual trick here is to fire the application in background (using "&"), so that mutt can resume operations immediately after the helper application has started. The problem is that once mutt resumes, it removes the temporary file containing the attachment, so if the helper application starts slowly it might not find it. One can force mutt to wait some seconds after having launched the helper application, but this not helps if the attachment is a multi-page PDF file, because once the wait has expired, the PDF file disappears and is no longer browsable.

I must say that using mutt was an enlightening experience (email browsing can be fast, after all!), but thunderbird makes me far more productive.

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ppt-attachments-in-mutt/

https://xkcd.com/196/

:-)

For non-text formats, I only deal with HTML. For them, I pipe the mail through a terminal-based browser before reading it. All of this is done automatically, literally a one-line configuration in the proper file, a thing that is explained at length in most mutt guides.

Think about how word processors were a thing so early in personal computers, despite then actually being some of the most complicated bits of software one can build. What are e-mails if not documents?

Having some control over formatting (at least in the semantic sense, like HTML) is a core part of using computers for a huge part of the population. Yes, even the people using only their phone. People like bolding text.

A lot of people aren't good at it, but a lot of people aren't good at talking either.

(The other is "I'm old enough to have been using text email since before graphical email clients were a thing and don't want to change.")

I'm a heavy VIM user. Gmail supports VIM keybindings and there exist VIM keybinding extensions for all popular web browsers, i.e. Vimperator on Firefox.:wq

and even if it were the truth: navigating mail generally consumes the least time... actually reading the mail and deciding what to do about it takes way longer. another activity where a scroll wheel is invaluable.

Depends on the kind of email you receive.

That said, I still find Thunderbird better than mutt, even though it takes ages to do anything and crashes 3 times a day.

that's what they said back in the early 2000s too, so I tried it, but I was appalled by the horrible support for message threading and IMAP support that was missing most of the features you'd expect an IMAP client to have plus the stuff that was there was full of bugs.

I'm sure this has gotten better by now, but a blanket statement of "Graphical clients are buggy" is totally not valid. All software has bugs and depending on your priorities some might be worse than others.

* A good integration to the rest of my IDE. I need to save a chain of email as .mbox to `git am` them afterward. I have this workflow with mutt, I don't know which graphical email client would allow me to streamline this.

* In the same vein, I need to be able to use only my keyboard. I tried a little using a web client with vimperator. But the gmail interface wasn't really easy to use, I prefer using mutt properly configured.

* I also like writing my emails using VI. Having those keybindings is a proper crutch, but it's not there for text editing.

* Finally, it allows me to have a transient workspace. I can SSH on my main machine from wherever, do a `tmux attach`, and I have absolutely everything available: access to my emails, but also integration to my other tools for email analysis / processing.

This all stems from workflow derived from ancient practices, that's true. When I was starting in the industry I mostly used graphical tools. More and more however, I tend to rely on purely TUI tools. I have a few things that I can simply not give up anymore (grep, find, sed, awk, as well as full access to git).

I only use the web for accessing articles or content aggregator like Hacker News, as well as streaming music to block the open space. Ah, yes, patchwork remains web-based, I haven't really used pwclient. When I have time I will look into this.

That said, there's a happy medium between console based email and bloated, buggy clients like Thunderbird. Claws Mail is a very old-school graphical client that supports modern email features, and it's about as tweakable as it gets.

Is there an email client that, when you drag a file icon into the composition window, doesn't attach the file but instead uploads the file to cloud storage and inserts a link? Now that I think about it, that's basically what Apple Mail's Mail Drop feature does (file is uploaded to iCloud, I think on send, recipients don't have to use Apple Mail and the file only remains on the server 30 days).

Thinking about the usual steps to attach a file compared to including a link to a hosted file, I think the latter much more takes one mentally out of the composition mode to deal with the hosting/sharing; dragging in a file attachment

"I'm writing an email that references a file. I get out of email to find the file. I'm dragging the file into the message window. I'm sending the email, it seems like its taking longer to send because it's a large file attachment."

"I'm writing an email that references a file. I get out of email to find the file. I move (or copy) the file to my cloud storage place (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.). I set the file to be shared. I copy the link to the file. I go back to my email and paste the link (or write some link text in HTML email and paste the URL). I'm sending the email."

Trillian is IM, but I believe it works that way

Are you actually convinced of that, or are you being inflammatory? Because, in 2017, it's hilariously far afield of most folks' email use patterns both at work and at home. Do you only ever communicate using text -- and plain text at that?

I work for a small software company - ie, full of nerds. We use screencaps marked up in email ALL THE TIME to communicate about changes and whatnot. Sure, I guess we could put it in a Word doc or HTML doc, but why bother when we can do it in the email client?

In my experience, it is rare that I need to look at an image or pdf, etc.

I'm not doing web development, so there is no particular reason any colleague would send me a screenshot.

Again, these are my observations and perhaps my window isn't big enough.

With a distributed team, it's even moreso. Plus, since we're distributed, the idea of email-as-document (with rich formatting and inline images) is just that much more normal.

As for attachments, you can open them in their native programs just fine.

I am not sure of your definition of normal. ;-)

Part of my duties at work include help desk and maintenance of a few pieces of software. I get eMail with screen shots of error messages on a fairly regular basis.

(Personally, I have made my peace with HTML eMail, what I really dislike are those humongous email signatures with corporate logos and silly disclaimers that often dwarf the email body itself.)

Email clients like gmail/outlook put images in the content of the email (NOT an attachment) when you drag/drop files onto the window or when you copy/paste a picture inside the mail.

There was a time when this all went to attachment, that is not the case anymore.

Sure it can be cumbersome if the various images are interleaved with commentary, but in my experience 99% of the time it's "Here are the pictures/documents you wanted" followed by a few attachments (inline or not).

There's a very, very small proportion of emails where HTML is actually mandatory to make sense of the contents. And for those I can just tell mutt to load the HTML in my web browser. I very seldom have to do that though, not enough to be a real nuisance.

Sure they do, by attaching them.

It's all quite painless really.

https://github.com/jezen/dotfiles/blob/master/.mutt/muttrc#L...

One of the few reasons I have to mess around with NoMachine etc is for email, if I could get it in a terminal over ssh that'd be great. I did try a few years ago and after wasting a lot of time sorting the config, the lack of good reading experience for rich content emails was enough for me to dump the whole thing.

I don't know if you are joking, but this was not uncommon for quite some time. It used to be that color printing was much more expensive than black and white. Text books often only had a few pages with illustrations and images in color. The color printed sheets were added last so they ended up exactly in the middle of the book.

> it doesn't exist anymore

Normal people send me pictures in emails all the time. Very often it's a screenshot of something where they have drawn a circle around some part and written some variation of "this part is wrong" or "can you take a closer look at this".

They shouldn't but they do. Almost every time someone sends me an image I think of a better place they could have put it. Attached to the ticket in our ticketing system, in our bug database, on our file server, etc

You don't get to dictate what features of email people should or shouldn't use.

Apple's Mail.app has a great feature that allows inline markup of images, which is a huge boon for interface discussions and tech support emails at my company.

At my old job, as an engineer, I also put images inline. I got emails all the time, or calls, asking why is this? The easiest way to show someone is in an email, with a screenshot.

Its not any different than an article in a newspaper or on a webpage with an inline image. It actually just works.

Despite my "Why Be Normal?" visor, I consider myself mostly normal. I send and receive email with inline images. Sometimes they're attached, which is usually annoying, unless they really aren't part of the narrative.

Normal people do it, because it's part of email.

"Normal People Do It" would make a great visor.

This is absolutely not true. Generally speaking, people whose experience leads them to think this are in weird isolated silos where highly technical folks are overrepresented.

I find the emacs editing experience so superior to anything else that I feel hamstrung in Gmail or Outlook.

Now I use Claws Mail with Emacs as the editor. This solution lacks integration with Org-Mode so I may end up going back to Emacs.

I can't imagine it. Too much valuable information comes in the form of rich emails for me to even try.

And then you have people who start using formatting semantically, e.g. colors.

Now, with all of that said, Emacs does a remarkable job of rendering a subset of HTML. For example, I have my mail client configured to always ignore HTML alternatives unless they're the only option. In that case, colors and tables and such are all rendered as they should be. Inline images might be supported if you use a graphical version of Emacs (Emacs can definitely display images, I just haven't tried in this context); you also have the option to open it in an external viewer, like a web browser.

I submit your understanding of how email works for most people in 2017 is outdated.

Email with inline images is common, useful, and not going anywhere.

I'd argue that images in emails means that you haven't reached 2017 yet, where there are loads of better options to share images.

Images as links to something else, that require an additional step, are an inferior substitute to inline images. Here in 2017, it's possible to build an email that includes tables or screenshots or other rich media that exist as part of the email itself.

This is commonly viewed as a benefit. 20 years ago, I, too, was resistant to the idea that email should be something other than plain text, but I was wrong. That ship has saild. Email today is a rich document, and rich documents often include meaningful inline images that should be stored with the document.

Again, that YOU don't like this doesn't mean it's not useful or widely used by other people.

Can you name a few examples of such rich media emails you recently received or sent and to/from whom (categorywise, e.g. family member, colleague, customer, department type)?

Obviously, people use email in different ways. This thread seems to have attracted a large number of people who exist in a text-only email world, but nearly every email I send or receive includes at least some rich formatting, and it's very common for us to include inline images of screenshots or other graphics as part of these emails.

And we're not web designers. We make project management software.

So: for me, mostly work email, though I certainly get no small number of personal mails with photos attached.

Again, that YOUR experience with email doesn't include rich text or inline images outside your spam folder doesn't mean those features are valuable and useful to other people.

* http://jdebp.eu./Proposals/gnksoa-mua.html#NoAutoFetchExtern...