Why mutt? Speed and flexibility.
If you subscribe to a number of mailing lists which are generally high-volume then mutt makes speedy navigation a breeze. Mutt is so highly configurable that I imagine no 2 person' mutts are alike. I switched from Netscape to Pine for flexibility and options and then from Pine to Mutt for even more. Mutt gives you choices about how to handle your mail that you wouldn't even have thought of while using another client. Mutt makes handling your email a highly personalized experience. This flexibility comes at the price of having a learning curve when it comes to setup and configuration but I don't see how you could have this level of flexibility any other way. To be honest, I had considered switching from Pine to Mutt several months before I actually did. My initial perusal of the muttrc left me somewhat overwhelmed so I put it down and came back later. I had only been using linux for a few months and wasn't ready for it yet. Using Mutt, I believe, has actually accelerated my progress at becoming a proficient user of Linux. It changed my perspective and my preferences from a GUI based one to a console based one. I remember hearing long-time linux users say that the command line gives so much more power, control and flexibility and I could intellectually understand the reasons they gave but it wasn't until after I had been using Mutt for a while that I developed a gut level appreciation for that point of view. Using Mutt also led to me using Vim as my choice editor. I know it was something written by Sven somewhere that convinced me of it but I don't recall if it was at his site, in a newsgroup or on this mailing list. Up till then I had been using GUI editors outside of mail and pico with mutt because I become accustomed to it in Pine. Now I use vim for everything and am grateful for having my eyes opened to it. I hope that the Mutt developers don't decide to make it more "useable" by dumbing it down. I believe this leads to applications geared toward the lowest common denominator and you end up with MUA's like LookOut! and OS's like M$. Mutt + vim + fetchmail + procmail + lbdb + gnupg + mixmaster = nirvana -- Ken Wahl [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.kenwahl.org/ PGP/GPG Public Key at http://www.kenwahl.org/pubkey.gpg Meme Propagation Engine (MindSec) [NSA] version 7.34-12i Weaponized Linux Kernel 2.4.9-21 Uptime Is 2 days 19:36
