A few months ago, I talked about my new email client, neomutt, and the default settings I settled upon. Nothing has changed much, except that I now use a single catchup email address, which makes managing emails more comfortable over time.

Here are a few other tricks that I learned (the hard way) in the meantime:

• If you use Vim or Neovim as your main editor for writing emails, you can enable spell checking as follows: set editor = "nvim +8 -c 'set textwidth=0' -c 'set spell spelllang=fr,en'". Note that you can use more than one language.

• I don’t like notification, but you can get live notifications on your desktop using inotify.

• If you have multiple accounts (past or present), it is useful to define alternates, e.g. alternates (john@smith.com)|(john.smith@(mac\.com|gmail\.com)).

• Folding may be enabled automagically for threads provided you ask for it, e.g., write folder-hook archives/* 'push <collapse-all>\n' in your muttrc config file, after replacing archives with the mailbox of interest.

• If you prefer reading plain text message over, say, HTML version, don’t forget to add alternative_order text/plain text/enriched text/html.

• If you use mu as your main backend to process your email archives, you can benefit from its search functionalities in addition to Neomutt builtin ones. I use the following bindings to query and retrieve results:

  macro index F "<shell-escape>mu find --clearlinks --format=links --linksdir=~/.mu/results " "mu find"
  macro index ,f "<change-folder-readonly>~/.mu/results<enter>" "mu find results"
  

• Rather than reading then deleting a message, you can mark it as read and delete it altogether using the following macro: macro index,pager X ":set confirmappend=no delete=yes resolve=no\n<clear-flag>N<tag-prefix><delete-message>:set confirmappend=yes delete=ask-yes resolve=yes\n<next-undeleted>". This way, to delete a message just press the X key; it will be marked as read and moved to your Trash folder. No more unread message in your Trash folder!

• To mark all messages as read, you can use the following macro: macro index \Cr "T~U<enter><tag-prefix><clear-flag>N<untag-pattern>.<enter>" "mark all messages as read".

• Finally, to view specific attachments, you can use the following settings:

  application/pdf; pdftotext -layout %s -; copiousoutput;
  # application/pdf; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s ; copiousoutput
  application/postscript ; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s ; copiousoutput
  application/msword; pandoc --from docx --to plain %s; copiousoutput
  application/rtf; pandoc --from rtf --to plain %s; copiousoutput