Back in 2005 or so, when I was a Linux noobie, I ran this complicated arrangement of sendmail, procmail, fetchmail and mutt to read and send mail. I liked that it was ncurses and I liked that it could handle attachments in a simple and clean way (let you extract them to file for later perusal). I disliked that it was a a juggling act of multiple programs and configurations.

At some point, many years ago, during a distro switch and fresh install, I decided that that had been too complicated and just ran either thunderbird or the email part of seamonkey. This was simple to set up: tell the program the server the email account name and the password. Bam, done.

Now, I would like to take email to an ncurses-based program, but with one binary, not four plus, with a single simple configuration file to set everything up.

Can anyone recommend one, please?

Thank you.

Years ago I tried out alpine with my gmail account and from what I remember it was easy to set up and easy to use. It comes with a stock Slackware installation so you're good to go if you want to give it a try.

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Hi,

as far as I know mutt can be used purely as an IMAP client in the same way as the gui clients your mentioned.

I also started using mutt a *LONG* time ago. In the beginning I had a setup pretty much as you describe. Over the
years I've stuck with mutt but have changed the backend stuff.

Currently I'm using mbsyc, doing filtering on the imap server and msmpt for sending mail.

While alpine probably does do what you requested, given that you are already used to mutt, I
thought it worthwhile pointing out that there is some middle ground between what you had in the past
and what you are looking for.

Cheers,

Evo2.

OP mentioned mutt, so I guess this is not what he was looking for ... but who reads posts anyhow? Everybody is in write-only mode ...

I read the post. OP mentioned mutt + 3 additional programs. OP doesn't seem to have a problem with mutt itself, but with having to manage/configure multiple different programs to do the job.

exactly right. The interface of mutt itself, what I can remember of it, was intuitive and nice, it's just having to use it in conjunction with all the other programs that i did not like.

Besides already mentioned Mutt and Alpine, consider also NeoMutt and sup. Some prefer reading their mail in Emacs. It has a bunch of mail readers (Gnus, mew, vm, wl, probably others). The JED editor also had a mail mode. More recently, it was forked as RED, but I don't know if the latter is compatible with required modes. Then there's Cone. And the venerable Elm still lives on in form of Elm ME+.

Thank you, everyone, for the replies.