i've used tui style email for a year

Back in November 2025, I switched over to TUI (text user interface) style email. It began with Mutt, but I needed some more functionality, NeoMutt had it, and that's what I went with.

I've customized things a little bit, but other than that, it's been the same setup for a whole year. A few times I was tempted to go back to Mozilla Thunderbird, but every time I gave it a go, nope, can't do it. Using Thunderbird feels like a giant, bloated sloth when compared to NeoMutt.

And there's no question that NeoMutt runs circles around using email in the browser. I'm not just talking about mega bloated crap like Yahoo Mail, but also "fast" stuff like RoundCube.

To be fair, RoundCube is nice. For anyone that has their own dot-com/net/whatever with a host provider offers it, yes, good option. Personally, if I used email on my phone (I don't), I would skip all the mail apps and only use RoundCube in a mobile browser.

But even as fast as RoundCube is, NeoMutt is still much, much faster. When you strip away all the GUI stuff that makes webmail work and get everything down to just text, no app nor webmail can beat it where speed is concerned. Things get even faster when you start using macros and regex.

I don't do calendaring in email

Calendaring is where webmail beats a TUI mail client.

The closest thing I do with email that resembles calendaring is a custom script I wrote that sends email notifications whenever I have an appointment to do whatever. Since the notifications are just for me, I don't have to worry about assigning specific contacts for calendar events or any of that crap.

And yes, it is crap. The first time I saw office style calendaring was with Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes in the late '90s. Hated them both because absolutely nothing in either software was simple to do. "Menu hell" is an understatement with both of those things.

Years ago, I did give both AOL Calendar and Yahoo Calendar a go, but both sucked at delivering email notifications reliably. Sure, you could add events all you wanted to, but getting notified was a different story where most of the time it flat out didn't work.

Only two things I ever used actually worked to reliably deliver event email notifications. The first was Send Later for Mozilla Thunderbird, but the problem with that is you have to run Thunderbird locally for that to work, all the time. Since I don't run Thunderbird anymore, I had to make a custom script instead, and that's what I use now.

Going TUI with my email was a successful effort to simplify, so I'm sticking with it. And my little script that sends notification emails is fine for my needs, because even though it's a script, things are still kept simple. I've never seen a calendaring system I actually liked on any platform. If I had to use one, I'd just buy a day planner and write things out by hand. True, I don't get any notifications in email or on the phone from using a day planner, but the simplicity that cannot be denied is there.

And yeah, I can't stand calendaring that much. I'd rather put pen to paper instead of use it on any computer, desktop or mobile.