The power of emails in the terminal: Neomutt (3/3)

╭── Notmuch, is it?

Beyond its unassuming name, it revolutionizes email searching. This tool perfectly integrates into your workflow and will help you retrieve any email instantly due to its lightning-fast speed and comprehensive filtering system.

Using the vfolder-from-query command (see the keybindings section ), you can perfom any Notmuch search you like. For example:

• notmuch search "meeting"
  Search your entire email archive for specific keywords
• notmuch search tag:inbox "project"
  Search for emails with specific tags
• notmuch search -tag:spam "important"
  Exclude emails with a certain tag from the search
• notmuch search has:attachment
  Search emails with attachment
• notmuch search filename:*.pdf
  Search emails with pdf attachment
• notmuch search "from:alice AND to:bob AND subject:report"
  Search with multiple filters using boolean operators

╭── Davmail

If, like me, you are forced to use Outlook services Davmail could be a life saver. It’s a POP/IMAP/SMTP/Caldav/Carddav/LDAP gateway allowing users to use any mail client with Exchange, even from the internet through Outlook Web Access.
I let you check the link above to see how to configure it. Don’t worry, it’s a GUI and it’s pretty straightforward. Jut make sure to use localhost and the right ports for your imap and smtp in your config files.

╭── Use the evil HTML

People can’t save themselves from using poor formatting, and many large companies’ email services default to HTML. As a result, you - the email recipient - have to deal with that.

We’ve seen earlier how to show HTML email in Neomutt, but you may need to send some as well. After lots of experimentation, I’ve settle on using a script developped by Daring Fireball .

This script is part of several commands I execute when sending my emails. All commands are stored in a html_send bash script located in my .mutt folder, and called with a keybinding .
This script itself is called with perl ~/.mutt//Markdown.pl --html4tags "$1" > /tmp/conv.html in my global bash script.

╭── Conclusion

This concludes my journey writing this post, and may mark the beginning of your journey with Neomutt. If you’re already using this email client, I will be happy if this post brings you more ideas of customization.
I will be extremely happy to hear about your use of Neomutt. You may have a better approach with HTML emails for example.

As a final note, I’d say that Tom Robinson picked my interest with Aerc - especially its asynchronous approach - but my Outlook work email was not working. Aerc is unable to handle “malformed header”, which happens with some email providers. This issue is known for at least 10 years (1 , 2 , 3 )