Gmail’s UI replacement

Before I moved to Gmail I used mutt, a command line mail client. I downloaded and uploaded emails with offlineimap, and used mutt to view, move, and delete the downloaded emails. Offlineimap was fine, but I had a few issues with it. Most of the time it was the local state getting out of sync with the remote side. I’d hit Ctrl+C or close the terminal at the wrong moment and some local state files would get corrupted. It was usually easy to fix, occasionally I had to remove all my local emails and re-download everything.

I set-up isync to see how it does, and thus far I like it. It seems a bit more lightweight than offlineimap. I haven’t had any problem with it yet.

Back when I used mutt, it was a pain to configure the way I wanted and I never really got comfortable with it even with my custom configuration. I disliked that I had to write a lot of configuration to get it to work how I wanted. Switching to Gmail was a breath of fresh air: because shortcuts weren’t configurable I just had to learn Gmail’s defaults. Today mutt is in a better shape than it was 10 years ago. I could give it another try, but I decided to go with aerc a relatively recent Email reader. aerc is opinionated about how its workflow, it’s configurable, but not to the same extend mutt is. I am still learning how to use aerc, things are a bit difficult to figure out at time: the current documentation isn’t that great. Otherwise I like its philosophy.