In my last post I wrote about needing to change some of the services I use from Proton in order to achieve a higher plane of leetness. Since leaving Protonmail for mailbox.org, I’ve enabled the use of neomutt (which was possible but a pain to set up with the Proton Bridge) which, so far, has been very good.
But what has really opened the gate to me using neomutt is mutt-wizard: a tool by Luke Smith. Neomutt is notoriously a pain to set up even without needing to deal with Proton Bridge, but with mutt-wizard it takes one command and a few seconds to set up, literally. It depends on a small collection of tools such as neomutt (obviously), curl, isync, msmtp, and pass. There are a few more recommended tools to use with neomutt after setup, but you can read more about those on the mutt-wizard site and in the mutt-wizard man pages, which are incredibly detailed and will answer anything you need to know about the tool.
When configured with mutt-wizard, neomutt uses sane vim-like keybindings which are very easy to pick up. You can press the ? key to bring up a cheat sheet to see all keybindings and unbound commands as well.
mutt-wizard works seemlessly with mailbox.org. To set it up I typed mw -a my@email.com, entered my mailbox password, and done. I synced the inbox and all my mail appeared. You can set up multiple accounts and switch between them quickly, too.
The only issue I had with the whole setup was with urlview, the tool used to view and open URLs while viewing an email. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it but I couldn’t get links to actually open in my default browser when selected inside urlview, and after some googling I found urlscan which seems to be better and is maintained. I changed the keybinding for urlview to open urlscan instead, and now I’m able to easily and quickly open links in emails.
Even though mutt-wizard makes it trivial to set up neomutt, it doesn’t get in the way of any tinkering. During setup the wizard creates a mutt directory in .config where you’ll find a general purpose muttrc, as well as an accounts directory where you can make changes to neomutt to sepcific accounts that you’ve set up. Nice!
I prefer to use a local email client because I hate opening a web browser when I don’t need to and I like having an automatic, local archive of all emails so that I really own them and don’t leave their preservation up to a provider. Neomutt configured with mutt-wizard is perfect for my needs because I’m addicted to vim bindings and I look like a hackerman when I’m just checking my email now. Lately, I’ve been messing around with DOOM Emacs (I’m writing this in org mode!) which includes an email client called mu4e. I will give this a try and at some point compare it to neomutt. I’m not totally convinced by the Church of Emacs just yet, though.