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ShowHN: A console based mail client with lua scripting

by stevekemp·13y ago·5 comments·view on hn ↗

For the past week/ten days I've been working on a console-based mail client for Linux with built in Lua scripting support.

Although it is not complete browsing maildirs, indexes, and messages now works well enough that I'd be curious if there is any interest.

https://github.com/skx/lumail/ http://lumail.org/

Now that the initial challenges are handled the next step is to wire up more primitives for the lua-scripting, implement "compose", "reply" and view/save attachments.

Then it will be my main mail client.

5 comments

This is quite cool. I've been meaning to switch to a console mail client for a while. (although personally I'd lean towards a CLI rather than a TUI)

The only CLI for mail that I'm aware of is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System

Otherwise mutt is probably the best console mail client out there.

Was sup (http://supmua.org/) one of the clients you looked at? If so, what advantages does/will luamail have over it?

Both sup and notmuch are clients that I've tried to use in the past.

Sadly neither would import my mail archive without crashing. Which is unfortunate because they look like they'd be pretty nice.

But in terms of advantages I'm finding the modal mode very interesting and the ability to open multiple folders. I guess via tagging regime you could emulate that in sup/notmuch, but I couldn't ever make them work on a decent size corpus of mail so I'm not 100% sure.

Right now I'd say the advantage is the lua scripting, which is letting me do interesting things even when incomplete.

cool!