On Mon, Jan 05, 2026 at 09:31:31AM -0800, David Champion wrote: > IMO mutt needs to keep up with the e-mail zeitgeist to survive. I want to > be part of that, I just struggle with finding time for it. But we also need > to be conservative, because as several people have mentioned "just working" > is part of the paradigm. We need to find a viable path for growth that > honors the needs of the community but still attracts users.
100% to all of this. I would love to see Mutt pull in builtin support (vs. the script in contrib) for XOAUTH2, for example, which is something that more and more users literally can't access their mail without... and maybe consider pulling out support for things like Mail-Followup-To, which were intended to become standards, but never became standard. On Tue, Jan 06, 2026 at 09:25:48PM -0500, Kurt Hackenberg wrote: > On Tue, Jan 06, 2026 at 10:35:24AM +0800, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote: > > > So I'm asking for and need help: someone(s) to lead the process of > > creating a new leadership and a committer team, and to set up a > > vision for how Mutt development should go from here. > You don't have to wait for volunteers; you could recruit, too. You > probably know a lot of Mutt people, and a lot of programmers. I don't think it's fair to expect more of Kevin here... and, in the meantime, he's still been willing to help with critical maintenance and security issues. I tend to feel like anyone taking this on would need to be someone who's already been contributing changes. It is a lot to ask, and many people in the community do help how they can (contributing translations, for example, or testing patches, or making fixes to documentation). > Did Michael Elkins[1] build an organization? If so, how, and what > happened to it? Did it fade away when he left? ME is still around; looks like he's at ISI now, but hasn't been actively involved in mutt development for quite a while (though he did commit and post as recently as 2016). Seems like normally maintainers have been people who were already trusted contributors to the project; I think Thomas Roessler and then Brendan Cully were the main maintainers before Kevin (based on copyright notes and git commits). I don't want to speak for others, but I doubt creating an organization was a goal at that time. It's probably obvious, but the Internet of when Mutt was written was also a very different time. I would also argue that it might not even be a reasonable goal now (look at the challenges with finding maintainers for software that's probably both easier to understand / maintain, and more widely used, compared to mutt). Having one or two maintainers who are willing to be reasonable arbiters of the factors mentioned by David above, as well as a few active contributors, seems like a good goal to me (and, I think Kevin is selling himself short -- he's done an amazing job of balancing people's varying (and sometimes strongly expressed) opinions. High level, people don't rely on email / news as much as they used to, the subset of people who want to use a console based mail client is increasingly small, and many of us spend lots of time on our mobile devices. Images, HTML, calendar invites, flowed text (which mutt supports, but has some quirks / limitations due to using external editors), etc. are also increasingly common.... even as a die-hard Mutt and console-based mail person, I find that I end up having to use other clients for various reasons at times. Add to that the (now dead) mutt-ng and neomutt forks, it's a very small ecosystem. While these projects may have been a reaction to some conservatism on the part of maintainers, I personally think that the maintainers of Mutt have largely made the the right choices about what to accept and what not to accept. As others have pointed out, the fact that mutt is in a relatively stable state is also not in and of itself a Bad Thing (TM). While mutt has a lot of technical users, there are probably a lot (myself included) who don't spend a lot of time writing in C or other systems programming language (no, I'm not advocating rewriting it). w
