Somehow mutt never dies or outlives its usefulness (see earlier Hawk Wings post, “mutt: A thing of beauty is a joy forever“).

At least, that’s the experience of the writer at dot unplanned .

Last week, he had one of those days on which Mail.app just refuses to behave:

Mail is just grinding and grinding and beachballing and gray-timering and I’m getting sick of it. Since most Mac mail apps suck, I usually end up on a primitivist kick, dusting off my old .muttrc and fixing things up a little and going in there to live.

As part of moving back in with mutt, he installed Alberto Bertogli’s X-Label scripts , which create custom headers that can store tags or metadata like MailTags or Gmail’s label feature.

Frank Barknecht likes Alberto’s scripts too. In fact, he has gone as far as adapting the X-Label script for Dave Allen’s “Getting Things Done” work management philosophy, and combining it with Kowey’s GTD/mutt macros to produce an elegant GTD solution with not a GUI in sight.

I take my hat off to these people. You can’t understand a word they write but, Golly, they are getting things done.

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Remember O’Reilly big hitter Allison Randal and her overflowing inbox?

She’s decided to try stemming the flow with Mail.app and MailTags and Mail Act-on , two of the very best plugins for Apple Mail.

It is interesting to see what she discovers and whether she is hopeful that it will be enough to meet the challenge of her 20,000 email inboxes. Interesting too to ponder whether better tools can beat a cultural problem.

Two things at least are better than she holds out. Emails can be tagged with rules in mail.app, so manual tagging is not the only way to bring some order into your data. And the public beta of MailTags does bring reliable syncing of IMAP tags between more than one Mac.

I think, though, that even the most partisan MailTagger would have to concede her other point. You do need to use a Mac to enjoy the plugin’s benefits.

I wonder if Scott is secretly working away on an Outlook or Thunderbird version?

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Mark Stosberg has posted a list of five power tips for serious Thunderbird users.

When Mark switched from mutt, he was “skeptical that any graphical e-mail program could rival Mutt for performance and efficiency, not to mention the simplicity of accessing it anywhere through a text-based console.”

But Thunderbird surprised him. Not only does it rival mutt, it offers “a number of new workflow improvements, especially easier filtering and labels.”

He outlines how he makes the most of Thunderbird’s filtering and labels to increase his productivity and offers four keyboard-enhancing extensions for Thunderbird.

He rounds his list out with “Master keyboard shortcuts” and a tip on using Unison to sync his Thunderbird folder between multiple Macs.

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Nick Gerakines has had a gutful of Mail.app.

“I’ve become sick and tired of Mail.app crashing and failing”, he writes.

So he is returning to an old favourite and he is liking what he sees after a few years away with other email clients:

I’ve used everything from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Mail.app, Evolution, Thunderbird, Entourage and even Squirrelmail. None of them, however, compare to the simplicity and security that I have with mutt.

He outlines how he has set up mutt to run on his Mac, and how it co-operates with fetchmail, procmail and postfix to deliver just the email experience that he likes.

He promises to post more detailed howtos soon.

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MacDevCenter has a tutorial on getting Apple Mail, Fastmail and mutt to work together.

Two of these are my favourite things, and I am learning to fool around with the third.

Also helpful for novice mutters, are this tip on mutt and Address Book from macOSXHints and “Mutt Nirvana”, a list of mutt tutorials and hints. The page is in Italian, but most of the links lead to English resources.

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Ever wondered why you don’t use mutt or pine to do email, even though it is very hip and a howto is only a click away?

A tip on macOSXHints about integrating mutt or pine with Address Book reminds you.

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