I haven’t used Mutt for email since sometime around 2004. At some point I tired of dealing with attachments and links and too many HTML-only emails and started using a normal GUI email client like everyone else.

This past weekend I was becoming terribly annoyed by how slow Mail.app had become. Every click meant a lag before what was supposed to happen happened. For the hell of it, I thought I’d play with Mutt again, even though I knew that it would probably be a complete pain. I was wrong.

Things have gotten easier in the nearly 10 years since I last installed it. A simple “brew install mutt” and a few gmail IMAP and SMTP settings and I was in. No MTAs or Fetchmail or Procmail or OfflineIMAP. Everything just worked with one quick install.

And then the tweaking inevitably began. I’ve got my keybinding configured to match Gmail. Added lbdb to search Address Book for email lookups. Added some VIM-specific config so that wrapping and highlighting do the right thing. You know, tweaking.

I don’t know how long I’ll stick with it, but Mutt is damn fast and damn powerful.