Adventures in Tech

I have been using mutt for some time now as my primary email client, and have found that I have not missed using any of the more graphical interfaces like Mac Mail, or Gmail web interface. Not even to look at HTML emails, PDF documents, or Word documents. Thanks to a couple of open source utilities, I can convert these documents to text, and read them from within mutt, leading to a seamless experience, and a much more pleasant email workflow. The following lines in your   ~/.mailcap config file configure the utilities and do the magic: HTML emails text/html; links -html-assume-codepage utf8 -html-numbered-links 1 -dump %s; copiousoutput I use the  links browser to do the conversion from HTML to text. There are many other options to use, such as Lynx, or w3m, but I like links because it formats the HTML tables better than Lynx or w3m, and handles utf8 characters better. You can also turn off the html numbered links easily if you choose to. PDF files application/...

For the last decade I have used web based email almost exclusively for work and personal use, and in due course have accumulated a rather large email archive. Lately I have been traveling a lot, and started missing offline email, especially since the flights don't have wifi in general, so I decided to augment my online email with an offline one. My first choice was Apple Mail. The setup and mailbox imports were a breeze, and the interface is beautiful. However the mail client crumbled under the large number of messages that I have: color beach balls were a common sight, and the client seemed to leak memory--after an hour of use, the memory footprint was roughly 2.5GB which made matters worse. I had a similar issue with other mail clients, and while talking to a colleague at work, I remembered that I did not experience these issues with a very old mail client that I used before: mutt.  So I went back to set it up. Mutt is not for the faint of heart, but techies shou...