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All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.

I get lots of e-mail, about 300 messages a day (excluding spam). Ok admittedly I don’t really have to deal with all of it immediately but if you let it go you very soon have thousand of e-mails waiting in you INBOX.

For years I used a mail client called Mutt. This was mostly because I spend my time using terminals, but also because it was the best available at the time. Mutt does not have a pretty face and definitely does not have any pretty pictures unless you ask it to show them to you. I then bought a Mac and started to use the Mac mail client.

Mail on the Mac actually performs its job quite well. It manages to sort mail according to thread (an essential feature if you subscribe to busy mail lists) pretty well. Mail also has a reasonable filter to move emails into folders and recognise junk mail. It certainly performs way better that the two offerings from Microsoft that still after many incarnations cannot sort messages properly.

Lately I noticed that my backlog of mail became larger and larger. I decided to bite the bullit and download the mutt sourcecode to compile it on the Mac. This was quite painless and pretty quickly I was able to dig up my old muttrc (configuration file) and with a few tweaks I was running mutt on the Mac.

What a pleasure! I halved the daily time I spend on e-mail and I also get through the busy lists like the postfix mail list in reasonable time.

To learn more about mutt see The Mutt E-Mail Client and My first mutt

Oh yes before I forget, if you still suffer using windows do not despair, mutt is available for Windows.

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