Switching to Mutt on OS X
For the past week or so, I’ve returned to an old habit. I’ve spurned OS X Mail in favor of text-based mutt. I used mutt as my exclusive email client for years after graduating from college, and Mail is the only GUI mail client that I didn’t absolutely hate. Sadly, I’ve been building up a slow frustration for a number of months that finally led to my seemingly drastic decision.
Simply put, Mail is too slow. This was never a problem before Tiger, so I wildly speculate that Mail’s shift to storing emails as individual files rather than monolithic mbox files has led to extreme unhappiness with my mail load. I have over 13,000 messages in my Archive folder and a further 12,000 sent messages. I’m unwilling to delete any of these. They are my records that help me answer infrequent but important questions. Think of my old emails as an answer cache that saves me the bother of solving the same infrequent problems over and over. Mail has started taking between fifteen and thirty seconds to even display my messages. Synchronizing with the server happens on a time scale that can only be called “glacial”. In contrast, with header caching turned on, mutt can draw up an initial display of my mail folders in 1-2 seconds with absolutely no subsequent delay in operating on that folder.
Compiling mutt was a piece of cake thanks to the Unix underneath OS X. I just grabbed the source and went throught the configure/make/make install trinity. IMAP support and SSL were handled seamlessly after the install.
The beauty of this situation is that, since I use IMAP, I can use other clients with mutt. Thunderbird is downright snappy if I need a graphical client, and a daily download from Mail ensures that Spotlight continues to work for me. The IMAP protocol removes any penalty for switching email clients.
I have this vague notion that I’m slowly returning to console-only applications, one app at a time. I’ve already started running a persistent screen with multiple named shells. It’s only a matter of time before I do something drastic like writing a series of Perl scrips to simulate Quicksilver and Spotlight.