Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

Aerc has been my daily driver for a long, long time. I use it with IMAP (GMail and other reasons) but its completely usable with local mail directories.

- I have redefined the Aerc key mapping with a set of Vim-like keybindings, since I am too old to learn new keybindings. And I bet now I as fast as possible slashing through countless mails…

- I configured Aerc to work properly with Gmail and Imapfilter.

- I created some filters that I missed from any mail client I ever tried (at least two keystrokes away). Like:

  ff = :filter -f<space> "{{index (.From | emails) 0}}" <Enter> # filter mails from current sender
  fs = :filter -H<space> subject:"{{.SubjectBase}}" <Enter> # Show Mails with the same subject
  fS = :filter -H<space> subject:<Space> # filter mails with subject e.g. "fs foo" filters mails with subject containing "foo"
 

If someone is interested, I will link my GitHub repo.

I have plumbed the depths of mutt, and I have discovered that, alas, graphical email clients fit my needs better.

- Mutt/aerc doesn't support windows, an OS many use by preference or requirement (though I have explored this with mutt[2], it's hard getting anything to work in mailcap on windows)

- Doesn't support viewing HTML email, a ubiquitous phenomenon

- Doesn't support sending HTML email, which is fine until your coworkers wonder why your mails always look funky and replies lose formatting

- I'm faster in Betterbird[1] than I am in mutt. Turns out drag-and-dropping mails into folders is pretty fast.

- Configuring an even halfway decent set-up takes ages, Betterbird just works out of the box

- Mutt relies on mbsync[3] or offlineimap[4], these tools don't support OAuth well. Betterbird supports it out of the box. (You can run without them, if you're willing to put up with bad buggy behavior in GMail where when messages are moved into folders they are only copied, the original message stays put in the original folder while a new message is copied into the other.)

- With shift+click, Betterbird allows the user to reply or compose using plain text just fine when the need arises

Sorry guys. I absolutely live in the terminal, but enough's enough. I'm out.

I do like using newsboat as an RSS reader though, that investment panned out so far.

1: https://www.betterbird.eu/

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39812124

3: https://isync.sourceforge.io/mbsync.html

4: https://www.offlineimap.org/

I got sick of having five different GMail tabs open (and two non-GMail mail tabs open), so I have been setting up aerc this week, using the Notmuch backend and either lieer (for GMail) or mbsync (for non-GMail) to sync the mail.

Its taken maybe a dozen hours to get it set up and get into the flow, but I find it much, much more enjoyable than my previous workflow. Plus, though GMail tabs each took a 100+ MB of memory in Firefox, the new setup is much less heavyweight, and the local search is speedy and high quality.

While tui mail clients always seemed appealing to me, I think I realized why something in me resists them.

The terminal is my "meditation space"; it's where I go when I want to focus deeply and do real and work that I enjoy; my playground.

Viewing or writing emails is a chore, just like Slack. I don't want that iny terminal.

The issues we humans have with emails in the present time lay in the lack of modern PERSONAL email tools development.

For modern and personal I mean NOT living on someone else mailserver but easily download or sync remote IMAPs, or to use them directly (with some issues [1]) or via a personal homeserver IMAP, with a modern search-based client like notmuch-emacs/mu4e, and a built-in decent filtering tool (like MailDrop).

We have essentially all the pieces (we can use IMAPFilter + OfflineIMAP to refile messages if we just sync them, or the old fetchmail + MailDrop if we download, using notmuch in Emacs or with also Aerc) but they are different software with different configs, styles, variable level of documentation and userfriendliness etc. There is NOTHING for less geek/expert users a thing that makes many considering email == webmails and so a webmail is a service by a third party (for such users) as is Slack, WhatsApp web and so on, a dangerous vision for the freedom of communication and the power emails offer.

I hope some think about that enough to makes thing changes not only at geek levels... It's not that hard having a MailDrop rule that match an ISP regular bill launching a script that add the due date, amount to an agenda, than check the local accounting software for relevant transaction presence and warn if something it's not as expects, not that hard with text-based tools, like org-agenda, BeanCount, MailDrop, emails. VERY hard with modern software and that's a big loss for many potential power users who can't profit of such easy automation simply because for them it's too long to learn and implement and often even an unknown option. IT was born to simply life and augment human cognition, it's very sad almost all have forgotten that.

[1] due to mail files naming syncing on multiple machines often create unread/tags annoyances, with duplicate messages generation and so on...

I love modern text based projects, really, thank you all for keeping the terminal alive and relevant.

I was watching this guy demonstrate using Emacs to read email with mu4e. He pipes the HTML directly to Firefox for viewing the HTML parts, and some others he converts to PDF to view them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uulLBKBMX8

aerc is really weird in the sense of being designed as a client, not storing the mails on your computer. Which has some performance implications and limitations. Though you can have local mail too, really felt like a second-class feature when I looked. But to be fair it has been a long time since I looked at it.

Given the above I'm really surprised that IMAP doesn't work better than it does. Often gets disconnected and I have to restart to get back to it.

Also have trouble with shortcut overlapping in neovim and aerc.

All in all, not super happy. I could maybe give it a second chance and see what I've missed in my setup, but currently more hopeful about neomutt.

himalaya looks promising..

https://github.com/soywod/himalaya

https://pimalaya.org/himalaya/cli/latest/index.html

I don't see an explanation anywhere what "TUI" is. I'm going to go with "text user interface".

I would really love to try a terminal email client with html email parsing.

I miss pine.

I'm kind of locked in to Thunderbird as it manages decades of my mail.

I wonder if one could develop a decent TUI for Thunderbird / its database...

The problem with a TUI is that it’s a silo. Makes more sense to have pipeable, scriptable program(s) to retrieve/filter/sync/send. Then you can make several different UIs for it—vim, emacs, web, vscode, acme, thick client, etc—with a minimum of effort. TUI ends up re-implementing a good part of tmux unnecessarily.

I frequently have to send e-mails from different addresses, so it seems I need to have manage multiple .conf files for this to work correctly? Example:

- login user: example@example.com - alises: *@example.com, postmaster@example.com, abuse@example.com ...

Mail addressed to "ex@example.com" is delivered to "example@example.com" inbox. But instead of replying from "example@example.com", I would prefer to reply via "ex@example.com"

Thunderbird offers the feature to modify the "from" header for each mail (which is nice). So I am curious how I would be able to do this with Aerc without having to constantly fiddle with the configuration files (ie, create new conf, add conf entry, ...)

That's pretty cool! I think it could use a bit more polish with the UI, maybe allow theming (for reference I did a theme for midnight commander recently - which is imo the best TUI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40741464 )

There's one big drawback I discovered the hard way, to not storing emails locally.

If you have to leave an org for any reason, you lose access to the entire email history with that org. Some of which might still be important to you for a multitude of very legitimate reasons (such as contacts).

I love aerc but I use it with my own mail server that is on the same LAN, which makes it very fast.

For HTML, if the mail is too complicated for the text renderer, you can pipe it to your browser with a single key.

With this setup, it is quite ideal for me.

Consider adding OAuth2.0 support. While Gmail IMAP/SMTP still supports Application Specific Passwords, you can see the writing on the wall, and the future is OAuth authentication.

I miss using a TUI for mail but it looks like they haven’t really solved the most important reason I don’t, which is rendering HTML emails.

I haven't tried to use this, but if someone has, how does it compare to alot (https://github.com/pazz/alot) which is the best TUI mail client I've used?

nice to hear that aerc is finally getting the recognition it deserves after being in the shadows for so long. I like how simple and intuitive the account configuration is - definitely stands out compared to other clients. the folder management feature is a game-changer - goodbye messy inbox, hello organized emails!

Thanks for this. I haven't looked at aerc in a few years and this is a good reminder.

Strange. I came for the screenshots - I love a good TUI - but there were none.

> This option is really simple: It allows us to override automatic sorting for certain folders. The specified folders are shown at the top of the folder list in the provided order. The rest are sorted alphabetically. This option should be in every email client. Sadly, I’ve never seen it in a graphical client (Thunderbird/Outlook) before.

Isn’t this just favorites? I’ve used them for over a decade in Outlook to keep some folders above others. It’s not configurable by a file, sure, but the feature is there.

pine

> Email authoring is an absolute pleasure. I really like the fact I can now compose my emails in vim.

Say no more.

I might be missing something but why would you want to use a terminal interface when a GUI is so much easier?

Looks good but wish it was written in C.

> In most multipart emails the plain text version is much less readable than the HTML version. It’s possible to grasp the meaning most of the time but sometimes it is just a garbled mess. Aerc has a few features to make this experience less bad. One option is viewing them through a HTML parser/browser (a combination of w3m and dante. This works well for some emails. The generated output is sometimes better than the plain text version of the email

This seems like a perfect use case for a (local) LLM. Feed in the HTML and extract a clean plaintext version.

This is the first I've read of "TUI" standing for what I have to assume is "terminal user interface"? I'd call them CLI (command line interface). When did this TUI acronym start? What does it mean? Everyone else seems to know it and use it without defining.