I really like thunderbird, and I used it for a long time, but now I am using mutt.
I realized that I was spending a lot of time in the terminal anyway (using vim as my daily driver) and it did fit me.
What I really like, is that you can script everything, create macro... It is hard to setup (too me like a week to tweak), but now I can do everything a lot faster with less overhead that what I did with thunderbird.
I still recommend thunderbird for less tech savvy users and I hope it will have a bright future.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. Having used Mutt for a while around the turn of the millennium, I returned to it about 5 years ago and I could have written this comment myself.
In my time using graphical mail clients, I’ve used Outlook Express, Eudora, Netscape Messenger, Sylpheed and Thunderbird. Thunderbird was my favourite of them all and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to others.
I’ve wondered for a while, how does mutt work for HTML-formatted email and other MIME types? I compose my own emails with plain text, but plenty of my colleagues as well as the various mailing lists, official emails, and other services that I receive communications with use email which looks like a web page, and I can’t really give that up.
Nobody stops you from sending text/markdown MIME type. It wouldn't even be hard to render both HTML and plaintext from markdown. "Just do it"
The hard part is to fix anything in most common e-mail clients, let alone add something new. One example being Thunderbird - notoriously stale tickets, undocumented codebase and nearly impossible to get anything merged.
What I do is have HTML messages piped through 'w3m --dump'. 99% of the time this results in a usable representation of the message. The other one percent of the time, it's just another couple of keystrokes to load the content in your web browser.
By default I use lynx, which is a bit better than w3m with some content (might be my config), otherwise I have a keystroke to load the message in firefox, but with newsletter adding "view in browser button" more and more, I nearly never use it.
I realized that I was spending a lot of time in the terminal anyway (using vim as my daily driver) and it did fit me.
What I really like, is that you can script everything, create macro... It is hard to setup (too me like a week to tweak), but now I can do everything a lot faster with less overhead that what I did with thunderbird.
I still recommend thunderbird for less tech savvy users and I hope it will have a bright future.