[Tutor] Partly Off Topic - Email clients for email discussion lists

[Oscar Benjamin]

On Thu, 5 Mar 2020 at 03:46, Alex Kleider <akleider at sonic.net> wrote:
>
> On 2020-03-03 08:10, Torbjörn Svensson Diaz wrote:
> > Dear Tutors,
> >
> > What are the best email clients for email discussion lists?
> >
>
> My internet provider gives me 'squirrel mail' as an option and it seems
> to work well enough.
> There are times I have to use gmail. It's horrid!

I don't know what people here have got against gmail. I'm using it
here and it works fine!

I have previously used mutt and it works well for some things and less
well for others. It's great for reading an old-school text mailing
list like this where you don't need to worry about images, html,
attachments etc. However in many other cases where you have to receive
arbitrary emails from anyone it fails. It's also not something that
you would want to use on your phone, is a pain to configure, is built
primarily around the idea of local rather than cloud storage and so
on.

Tips if you are going to use gmail for an email list like this:
1) Don't sign up to receive digest emails: set up a filter so the
mailing list skips the inbox instead.
2) Enable the keyboard shortcuts: the most important ones are j and k
which navigate up and down between threads marking them as read.
3) When replying by email you can use Ctrl-A or Cmd-A to expand the
quoted parts that are otherwise hidden by the little dots.
4) You can configure gmail to reply in plain-text mode: click the
three dots at lower-right when replying. I get plain text by default.

The advantage of using gmail is that I can read the threads on my
phone or on any computer without any configuration needed. The
read/unread status of threads is stored at google's end so I can see
where I was whichever device I use. The advantages of mutt over gmail
are that mutt gives a better view of the tree structure of a thread
and is always monospace which is good for code (there are browser
extensions that make gmail use monospace).

I notice now that some Python-related mailing lists seem to be
migrating over to discourse instead of mailman which changes the
situation somewhat. With discourse you can explicitly format code with
backticks in the github/stackoverflow style. This means that code
displays as monospace in the html version of the message that you will
be able to see in gmail but presumably not in mutt. The discourse
style list means that you probably want to reply via the web rather
than email and that if you are browsing by email you probably want a
html-enabled email client.

--
Oscar