Hi all,
I really, really like Mozilla Thunderbird; but what I have come to like even more is not leaving my terminal. Any recommendations on email clients in the terminal?
I’ve been thinking about aerc, but I’m curious what’s working (or not) for all of you.
mutt seems like it’s crazy difficult to set up (which I’d rather avoid).
I need something that can handle all the account types I use with Thunderbird—namely, gmail and Microsoft exchange.
Thanks!
I tried aerc, neomutt, and alpine a while back and preferred aerc. Neomutt was a bit too much config for my liking. Alpine was ok but aerc was my easier to get everything setup the way I wanted.
Here are my dotfiles for you to have a look and get an idea: https://codeberg.org/n0p1lls/Config/src/branch/main/dotfiles
There you can see how to configure the mutt client, adjusting it to you through some small changes.
For example, instead of: “set record=“imaps://imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Enviados” for your gmail account, if your language is English, it would be something like this: “set record=“imaps://imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Sent".
More information at: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mutt
If you want to configure the keybindings, see this section: https://neomutt.org/guide/configuration#6- changing-the-default-key-bindings
I had a hell of a time trying to use Gmail and exchange email from the terminal clients I tried. Mostly because of security features. I never got it working but aerc looked really nice.
I have gmail, exchange, and disroot accounts setup in neomutt. For gmail I had to generate an app specific password for neomutt because I use 2FA with gmail and neomutt doesn’t use Oauth2 as authentication method. Although, I was too lazy to try them, there are some options to use xoauth2. No surprise, exchange was the trickiest one to get working. I have to use Davmail for that. Behind an apparent complexity you just need your exchange email URL to get it running, and then you use the Davmail ports in neomutt.
If you have trouble because the clients do not support native oauth, you can try to use a auth dameon like https://github.com/ltratt/pizauth
