the last great nav app goes evil
I periodically look up navigation apps on my phone mainly for entertainment, because it's funny to read the complaints. I read the gripes people have, and think yep, you should've bought a Garmin, be it 5" Drive 53, 6" DriveSmart 66, 7" DriveSmart 76 or 8" DriveSmart 86.
I'm a staunch Garmin user, but even so, I have a backup nav app on my phone. That app was no longer being shown to me in the Google Play Store. This was weird, because that means my phone is "too old" to run that app, so I go over to a web browser and look up the app.
And whoa, did this app drop a train on everybody that used it.
The app I was using for backup navigation was Magic Earth. This app is OpenStreetMap based and was totally free. Yes, was. Without any warning whatsoever, the new version released now has a paywall on it. Instead of getting everything in the app for free, a subscription is "required" to "unlock" all the features. And from what I read in the reviews, you don't get everything back that was in the previous version even if you do pay.
WOW.
The interesting thing is since my phone was "too old" to run the new version, I still had the previous free version that worked perfectly fine. But I'm certain Magic Earth will stop delivering free maps for old versions if they haven't already, so I just deleted it off my phone. See ya.
Over the years, I've watched nav app after nav app do this and it never ends well. It starts off as free, stays that way for a few years, and then whammo, pay up.
But the nightmare doesn't end there. The subscription structure doesn't stay consistent at all. First it starts off as yearly, then biannual, then quarterly, then monthly. Any nav app that charges anything always does this, and many times I've see user reviews to the tune of people paying for a 1-year subscription, the subscription structure suddenly changing, 1-year option disappears, user gets locked out, is NOT REFUNDED, and told to pay again, pay monthly, or go away. And there's not a damned thing the user can do about it.
The push to go monthly is because the most money is made that way. The subscription starts off at $20/yr, which is $1.67/mo. Then it changes to "only $15" every 6 months, which is $2.50/mo. Then it changes to "only $10" every 3 months, which is $3.33/mo. Then it finally tops out at "only $4" a month or more than that, depending on how greedy the company is. Every single subscription structure change is specifically done to charge more every month by design. Rope people in, raise the price, rinse and repeat.
Things don't end there, as there's one more thing that makes a modern nav app truly evil. I don't know if Magic Earth is doing what I'm about to say since I can't run the app anymore to see for myself, but it wouldn't surprise me if they are. The true evil happens from "securely storing" all saved favorites, past locations and/or tracks and routes in the cloud. Anything saved in the app is locked behind a paid account, effectively holding the data hostage. Oh, you want to continue to have access to your data, do you? Pay up, sucker. And if the company one day decides to quit and the app stops working, everything saved is lost. And no refunds.
Also, if the company quits, which could and probably would happen, will they sell off all the personal data for every user? If they do, a "terms of service update" will occur right before they jump ship to make you "permit" them to do it. They know nobody ever reads that. Or at least not read it until it's too late. Thanks so much for being a customer, bye!
The ruination of phone navigation continues
Magic Earth spells out what will happen with all navigation on the phone. Anybody who uses the phone for navigation now will inevitably suffer the same nightmare. And it's not a possibility, it's a certainty, regardless of app used. They're all going to go full evil.
I am so glad I never switched over to phone navigation. What a mess.
after buying casio watches off and on for 15 years...
I recently bought a second Casio AE1000W. I still have the first one but don't know when it was bought. I'm thinking it has to be at least a decade old. I do remember I bought it from a Target store in Tampa Bay Florida. Which one? No idea, but the reason I remember it was from Target is because of a price match thing that got the price down to about 15 bucks. The price of an AE1000W now is of course more, but it's still not crazy-expensive.
My reason for buying a second one is because it's a 2010 model still being made today, I like it, and wanted a backup. Fortunately, Casio is still making the AE1000W exactly the same as they did in '10, easy-press buttons and all, which I very much appreciate.
I was favoring the W735H for a while, but the thickness and weight of it was annoying me. That watch is 51.7mm lug-to-lug, 47.1mm diameter, 16.1mm thick, 50g in weight. After that, I favored the WS1600H, which is 45mm lug-to-lug, 42.1mm diameter, 12.5mm thick, 39g weight. Much nicer, but it too started annoying me because the buttons are annoyingly stiff and I'm not a fan of the menu system. An example of that is that it takes 5 mode button presses just to get to the alarm screen. Dumb.
Then there's the AE1000W, which is functionally identical to the AE1200WH, but without the stiff buttons nor the annoying layout. 48.2mm lug-to-lug, 45mm diameter, 13.8mm thick, 40g weight.
The most annoying thing to the point of being almost infuriating about the AE1200WH is the insert sitting on top of the LCD.
Specifically, I'm talking about the black bar just below the map. That stupid bar casts a shadow, effectively making the date unreadable when viewing it outside during daylight. It is a common mod for AE1200 owners to take the watch apart, take out the insert and cut that bar just to get rid of that shadow. There's no need to do this on the AE1000W since the date is displayed at the bottom of the LCD.
A feature I use is the countdown timer and can't go without it. If I didn't need the timer, I'd honestly wear a W218H all the time. That watch has ridiculously good legibility with no LCD washout, absolute top tier night light, very nice easy-press buttons, great size, looks like a G-SHOCK square, light weight...
...but again, I need that timer as I do use it often. And as it turns out, the AE1000W is the Casio watch I fight with the least, so that's what's on my wrist.
For the past 15 years, I've been buying Casio watches. Simple ones, complicated ones, big, small, digital, analog, ana-digi, and so on. I've determined that what I get along with best is something lightweight that's 100% digital, shows time + day + month + date on the home screen, has multiple alarms, and of course the countdown timer. The weekday has to be 3 letters like WED for Wednesday instead of just WE. The menu system it uses has to make sense. Numbers when adjusting settings must be able to be scrolled forward or backward. The watch must have easy-press grippy buttons or I want nothing to do with it. The battery has to be easy to replace. The style has to be basic black with wide (meaning not F-91W skinny) strap. AE1000W covers all those bases.
AE1000W has two basic black models. AE1000W-1AV and AE1000W-8AV. Both of mine are 1AV which has some small text in a light gold/brown and black everywhere else, which is fine. In photos, that text looks like a louder orange. It's not, and is gold/brown like I said. The 8AV, a new colorway for this year, has that same text in a muted blue. I did consider getting that as my second AE1000W, but said nope, I'll stick with what I know.
There is a specific alarm feature I really like that I've only seen on the AE1000 and AE1200, which is 1-ON. Instead of having a worthless "snooze" feature or alarms that can sound on a particular date (very annoying to set), you have 3 options for each of the 5 alarms. ON, 1-ON or OFF. ON and OFF are self-explanatory. When set to 1-ON, the alarm sounds at the time set, then automatically switches to OFF. What makes this great is you don't have to remember to go back and disable the alarm once after it sounds. If you want that alarm to repeat at the same time every day, that's what ON is for. If you need it to just sound once and then disable until you need it again, 1-ON. Very nice feature.
The alarm setting is a very good example of what I mean by fighting with a watch. On other Casios, that stupid alarm once set will sound every day. If it sounds on a day when I don't want it to, that's annoying. If I actually need the alarm to sound but forget to enable it, also annoying. The 1-ON alarm feature eliminates two annoyances, so it's a watch I fight with less.
But that doesn't mean I don't fight with it. As good as 1-ON is, the AE1000W is missing something I have on other Casios. On both the W735H and WS1600, when setting an alarm, the current time is also shown at top while setting it, which is very convenient. There are times I'll go to set an alarm and forget what time I just saw two screens ago, so I have to leave the alarm screen, go back to home screen, read the time, back to alarm setting, set again. The infuriating thing is that Casio could have switched the bottom part of the LCD switch to show the current time while setting the alarm, but they didn't do that.
Is there a 100% digital Casio model other than AE1000 and AE1200 that has multiple alarms, AND shows the current time while setting an alarm, AND has 1-ON? Other than the AE2000W and AE1400WH, which are basically just bigger versions of the AE1000W that I can't wear, no.
Not having the current time shown while setting the alarm on the AE1000W isn't a deal-breaker since having the 1-ON setting for all 5 alarms is so convenient.
I have other small complaints about the AE1000W, but they're not worth mentioning because the positives outweigh them. I can adjust the night light to stay lit for 1.5 or 3 seconds. Good. There is a physical thin vertical line on the LCD at bottom separating the day from the date. Good. The leftmost digit for the larger numbers is not "scrunched" when it shows a digit other than 1 (many Casios purposely make the leftmost digital smaller). Good.
The menu system does make sense, but there are four oddball settings.
Mute feature. That's a press-and-hold of the bottom left button for 4 seconds, then MUTE appears at top left of the panel. Repeat to unmute.
Auto Display feature. Four different time zones, T-1 through T-4, can be set for the home screen. To have the AE1000W auto-scroll through them, press-and-hold bottom right until a beep happens. Each time zone is then displayed for 2 seconds until you leave the home screen or short press of bottom right button.
To swap one time zone for the other, such as swapping T-1 with T-3, you have to select it first with bottom right, then press top left AND top right. A quick double-beep happens, and one time zone is swapped with the other. Repeat process to switch it back.
To swap the "world time" to home time, press bottom left to go to WT screen, press top left AND top right. Repeat to switch it back.
Before writing this, I totally forgot about the top left + top right button combo to do the time zone swap thing and had to look it up in the manual. But I remembered everything else.
Things I've learned after buying way too many Casios for about 15 years
1. Solar sucks.
Better to just use a "10-year battery" model, provided the battery is relatively easy to change. The AE1000W is one such model.
2. Modding ruins watches.
I did try my hand at modding with a few Casios I owned in the past. Bad idea. Don't do it.
3. Basic black is the only style that works on a digital.
I've owned Casios in other colors, and got rid of them all. If it has the resin strap, what works best is black strap, black case, positive LCD panel.
4. Dopey text sucks.
Casio is infamous for putting way too much printed and/or embossed text on their digitals. At least with the AE1000W, that text is kept to a minimum. For a Casio, that is.
5. Atomic timekeeping sucks.
This is all Casio Wave Ceptor models. I own one, the WV58. Works fine, but in reality, the worst that can happen for any plain non-atomic Casio digital is that it will be off by 30 seconds after 30 days. Again, that's a worst case scenario. That being true, plain quartz is pretty much just as good as atomic.
6. Tool-specific models suck.
I've owned "Fishing Gear" Casio models, "Runner's" models, and the like. I don't use any of that tool-specific crap. Just give me a way to read the time and date in a way I like, alarms that can be set how I like, a countdown timer, and I'm good.
7. All Casio digitals look goofy.
There's no way around this. If it's not the dopey text on the case, it's the case shape. If it's not the case shape, it's the text on the panel. If it's not the text on the panel, it's the way the buttons stick out. It's always something. I've learned to accept the goofiness of Casio digital watch design, especially considering there's really no such thing as a truly classy digital timepiece. The closet thing I have to a 100% digital classy Casio is the B650WD. Dopey text is kept to a minimum, LCD panel is clear of any inserts, and the minimalist design works. That's as least-goofy as you can get.
Right now, the AE1000W suits me unless Casio comes up with something else that would suit better.
tui, the interface for gen x nerds
I first said that I might be switching over to using email in the terminal. After that, I talked about Inbox Zero.
After a lot of experimentation, I found a setup that works for me, so I'm going all-in with TUI for my email.
TUI, as in Text User Interface, is as computery as it gets. The email client I've decided to run with is NeoMutt, and for one main reason. It has something regular Mutt does not called New Mail Feature. If NeoMutt did not have this very specific thing, I wouldn't have bothered with it, and I'll get back to this in a minute.
My NeoMutt setup is a combination of POP3, IMAP, getmail and server-side filters. It's complicated, and I'll leave it at that. I don't think anybody who uses Mutt or NeoMutt does it simple, because why bother with the plain stuff when you can customize the bejeezus out of it.
As complicated as my NeoMutt setup is, the end goal was to have very minimalist email that works. Did I get it? Yes. Mission accomplished. The complicated stuff is done, and now NeoMutt just sits there and does its job.
The older I get, the more minimalist my computing becomes. Having email as a terminal text-based thing brings a feeling of calm and peace. The experience could even be described as zen-like. At some point I may even go to the next level and pare down my Linux setup to using an ultra-lightweight window manager like Openbox. Or maybe Xfce, which while not ultra-lightweight is something I always got along with in the past.
This is not to say I want TUI-everything, because I'm not about to start using the internet that way. But where email is concerned, TUI truly is a proper fit since it's just all messaging.
However, there is one GUI thing I wanted, and wow was it a fight to get it, but I figured out a way. In fact, what I'm about to describe is a battle I've had to engage in every few years for one reason or another.
First, rewind the clock back to the late 1990s.
Microsoft Outlook Express had this very nice thing where when a new email arrived, an icon would appear next to the clock. That was your mail notification. The "full" Outlook had this too. Also very nice.
That little icon, while not sounding like all that much, was really convenient. You didn't have to open a window to check your email. If you had a new-mail icon down there at the clock, you had new mail. If not, no new mail. Simple, easy, and almost perfect.
Where things got perfect, at least for a while, was with Mozilla Thunderbird. You could still get that icon in the tray for new mail, but also something else. With the right plugins, you could "close" Thunderbird, but instead of it closing, it would minimize and HIDE itself. How did you get Thunderbird back? Look for the little Thunderbird icon next to the clock. Click-click, and up pops your email. Click the minimize OR close button in Thunderbird when done, and it keeps running but hides itself away. If there was no new mail, a little plain Thunderbird icon was displayed. For new mail, it changed to a different icon of your choosing. And as soon as you read all your new mail, the icon would automatically switch back to the no-new-mail icon. Brilliant setup.
This setup is commonly known as minimize to tray. It means, "When I click minimize or close in my email program, keep it running, but hide it, show a tray icon next to the clock that I can click to bring up the email program when I want, have that icon change to show whenever there is any new mail in the inbox, and also change back to a no-new-mail icon when all new mail is read."
Only two email clients in Linux I know of mostly do this right, Sylpheed and Claws Mail. You can configure either so when minimize is clicked, it stays running, hides, shows an icon in the tray, changes the icon whenever there is new email, the changes it back when all new mail is read. Clicking the tray icon brings up the program. However, if you click X to close the program, it just closes. You can't do the "clicking minimize OR close just minimizes to tray" thing. Like I said, it mostly gets it right.
I do not have minimize-to-tray for NeoMutt, but I was able to come up with the next best thing.
NeoMutt's New Mail Feature allows the client to fire a command or a script whenever new mail arrives. A simple example of that would be to fire notify-send -t 5000 -a "NeoMutt" "You have new mail" for a 5-second desktop notification. And yes, there are ways to pass over the subject line and other stuff in the notification if desired.
However, that's not what I wanted. I needed an icon that appears and stays there where I can see it.
I tried getting an icon to appear in the tray, but nope, nothing I did worked. Just when I was about to give up, I had the the thought it might be possible to change the Konsole titlebar instead. Did some experimentation, and yes, THAT worked. Whenever a new email arrives, NeoMutt fires a script, and the titlebar changes to show a light bulb emoji icon followed by "new mail". That's exactly what I needed. And this is one of the very few instances where I was happy emoji icons existed, because it saved me the hassle of having to figure out how to show a PNG in the titlebar area.
After that, I needed a way to reset the titlebar. It was much easier to figure this out. I assigned a NeoMutt macro to F8 that runs a tiny script to change the titlebar text. Done. Yes, it has to be done manually, but at least I don't have to restart the client. There is probably a way to automate this using folder-hook, but I'm fine with what I have because it works.
Is this as good as minimize-to-tray? No, but it's good enough. The only GUI thing I wanted was that new-message icon notification, and got it. Considering the fact that NeoMutt by its very design doesn't do graphics at all, I think I did okay.
Why did I go through all this crap?
It's for minimalism as mentioned above, nostalgia because it reminds me of BBS messaging back from the early '90s, futureproofing so I have an email UI that absolutely does not change, and understanding that text is text.
The worst messaging experience is in a graphical web browser. All web browsers are memory-hungry pigs. Add in images, audio, video, emojis, bloated code, badly written JavaScript, servers getting blasted with millions of data requests, and the whole thing is miserable to use. It doesn't matter if it's email or social media. The experience of using messaging in the graphical browser sucks because of all the garbage intertwined with it.
Messaging is about the text. No graphics are required to read text. Strip all the crap out, and messaging gets better instantly.
Only when messaging is experienced in something like NeoMutt does one truly understand how weighed down a graphical web browser actually is. This is when mini PCs and refurb Dell Latitudes start looking really attractive. You get one of those, yank out the drive, slap in a 500GB SSD if it needs one (you don't need anything more than that for a host drive), install Linux, install your TUI programs like NeoMutt and whoa-ho... wow, it's really, really fast with no choke anywhere.
If you're wondering, yes, others have tried to do the text-only thing with social media like Facebook. I'm not talking about a "lite" or "basic" version, but rather a very stripped down text-only experience. It's an unfortunate truth that programs and apps that deliver a social media text-only experience never last. As is the way of things, the platform will inevitably change something (by design?) that makes text-only programs/apps break.
With email, as long as your account has POP3 and/or IMAP access, you can still strip it all down to just text.
TUI for email use is awesome.
applying inbox zero to email with mutt
Inbox Zero is a workflow philosophy. You have a bunch of messages sprawled all over the place, everything is a total mess, and the end goal is to bring order to that chaos.
Achieving Inbox Zero isn't about having zero messages in the inbox, but rather about eliminating clutter. Uncluttering eliminates stress, and establishes better control over your life.
I've been using the Inbox Zero philosophy for years, but I had to figure out how to apply it to Mutt. I did find a way.
Before I explain that, I'll first describe how I used Inbox Zero with the Thunderbird email client. You can actually use Inbox Zero with any email client or email in the browser, but Thunderbird is the one I know.
Correction: I'll complain about text messaging on the phone first, then describe Inbox Zero with Thunderbird.
This needs to be said, because this complaint is legitimate.
Most messaging apps on phones do not have an archive feature. To archive means to move messages to a different place, but have it be accessible. In other words, move messages out of the inbox once you're done with them, just like you would in email by moving messages from one folder to another. You don't want to delete, because you may have to bring up that message later. All you want to do is move it elsewhere to unclutter that inbox and get it clear.
It should be stupidly easy to do this on a phone, because messages are messages whether emails or texts. But with most texting apps, you have no ability to move messages. For any message you receive, you have only two options. Delete it after reading, or let it stay there forever. Both options suck.
Keep in mind this isn't even a privacy thing. All you want to do is MOVE the message somewhere else in the app. But again, on most messaging apps, no such feature exists, and that's stupid.
With email, it truly is easy to move an email elsewhere.
For example, let's say you buy a thing on Amazon, such as a hideous three wolf moon sweater to show off your awful fashion sense. And maybe you complemented that with a beer hat, because screw it, why not.
So you order that stuff. Amazon will send you an email after purchase confirming the order as they always do. Right.
This is where Inbox Zero comes into play.
That confirmation email is now a to-do, and stays in the inbox until the stuff you ordered arrives in the mail or you go pick it up. Once you have the stuff you bought, you move that email out of the inbox to the archive folder.
Said another way, for the entire time that email sat in your inbox, it was an uncompleted task. Once the task has been completed, you archive the email. Easy enough to understand.
In Thunderbird, all it takes to move an email to the archive is the press of one key, A. That's it. And if later on you say to yourself, "What the hell was that crap I bought a month ago?", just run on over to the archive folder and the email with all the info you need is there.
Keeping the inbox clear is an absolutely brilliant way to separate not-done from done tasks, truly.
And now you can understand better why it's so infuriating that you have no way to do this with most phone messaging apps. All your text messages are just one big ol' honkin' totally unmanageable list. Stupid.
The Mutt method of Inbox Zero
In the way most nerds use the Mutt email client, all the email is in the inbox. True, you can create separate IMAP folders, but it's better to have all the mail in a single place, especially if bouncing around from computer to computer.
Mutt does support label assignment. While that does help with message management, it can be more trouble than it's worth.
The secret sauce to making Inbox Zero work in Mutt is the use of two things. Flag and Limit.
Flagging is synonymous with "starring" a message. To flag any message, highlight it and press F. And yes, it's a capital F. An exclamation point will be then shown next to the flagged message in the message index. To remove the flag, press F again. This will be important to know in a moment.
After that, press l (lowercase L). "Limit to messages matching:" appears. Type this:
~N | ~F
...and press Enter.
The inbox then only shows two types of messages. New ones, and flagged ones. If you need to view all messages again, that would be l (again, lowercase L), type all, press Enter.
For any email you want to stay in the inbox as a to-do, flag it. Once the task is done, remove the flag on the message, set Limit to all, then set Limit to ~N | ~F again. I have this set up as Mutt macros to do this real fast. F5 to set Limit to view all messages, and F6 to set Limit for flag+new.
The main difference between the Thunderbird way and the Mutt way is that with Thunderbird I physically moved mail to a different folder, while in Mutt I just use a filtered Limit view to show flagged+new messages. The end result is the same, and I was able to get the same sense of Inbox Zero in Mutt that I had in Thunderbird.
With a Limit view of new+flagged set, new messages still appear when they arrive, flagged messages stay visible, and all the other messages stay hidden. I don't have to worry about juggling around message labels or date ranges or whatever. It's a beautiful thing.
You don't need Mutt to achieve Inbox Zero
Originally, I started figuring out Mutt to get out of GUI hell with my email. That isn't a part of Inbox Zero, but at the same time kind of is. You wouldn't think a mouse-less, graphic-less email client could bring a better sense of order (and peace?) to messaging, but it does.
I'm not going to tell anybody to switch to Mutt. Kind of a big learning curve there. It's a nerd's way of doing email, no question.
Most people use email in the browser. Thankfully, all the popular free email providers make it easy to archive messages.
If you ever looked at your email and see nothing but a giant ball of chaos in your inbox, clear it out. Don't delete messages. Use the archive feature, move all that crap to the archive folder, and then treat your inbox like a to-do list.
Inbox Zero is truly achieved once you actually feel good using your email or whatever messaging system is being used. You shouldn't have the feeling of, "Ugh, I have to use this thing again.." If you feel that way, Inbox Zero helps relieve that stress.
The majority of messaging apps on phones are complete dumpster fires, but email is something you have a lot more control over. All it takes to make email feel good again is to start clearing that inbox and make use of the archive folder feature.
switching to terminal based email. maybe.
I've been using email since the late 1990s, and learned early on that the best way to use email is with client software. Browser based email a.k.a. webmail has always sucked. The same can be said for email on the phone. I don't use email there, but if I did, I would use a mail client app.
In the early days, my go-to was Microsoft Outlook Express 6. Later on, I switched to Mozilla Thunderbird and have pretty much stayed with that ever since.
However, there's a problem when using a GUI mail client like Thunderbird, and it's the same problem webmail has.
Unwanted changes due to "upgrades".
Browser based email, be it Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail or whatever can change at any given time, and there's not a damned thing you can do about it. The changes will always be labeled as new-and-improved, but that doesn't mean you'll like them. In fact, you'll hate them. Over time, you'll begrudgingly get used to the changes you didn't ask for. And then when you finally get somewhat comfortable with the stupid changes that were made, yep, you guessed it, more changes happen that you didn't ask for. Rinse and repeat.
GUI mail clients typically don't change, but other things gum up the works in how it functions. And this is where Thunderbird can become a steaming pile of crap real quick.
I've had to "upgrade" Thunderbird several times over the years. Every upgrade was forced. The forced upgrades were due to a number of factors. OS changes, plugins that "required" newer Thunderbird just to work, and so on.
Believe me, if it were doable, I would run Thunderbird version 3.1.20 forever, but nope, can't do that.
Presently, I run Thunderbird version 60.9.1, and that's only because I was forced off of 52.9.1 due to emoji issues. I'm not kidding. In Linux, any emoji displayed in a subject line or body of a message goes super-giant sized. Yes, there are workarounds, but they're too annoying to deal with. The only fix was to use version 60. I mostly got everything I wanted working there that I had in 52.
And oh yeah, version 60.9.1 is old, released November 2019. However, it works. The plugins I have, along reading messages in plain text for better security, using regex filters to sort and get rid of junk without issues, having the ability to schedule future emails and so on, it's all good...
...for the moment.
There is going to come a point in the future with whatever Linux I'm using where Thunderbird 60 simply won't work, possibly before 2027. And I'm not about to use modern Thunderbird, especially since they switched over to "requiring" an upgrade EVERY MONTH. I can only imagine how often that will break plugins. Screw that.
Are there alternative GUI mail clients to Thunderbird? Of course there are. Are any of them any good? Nope. I've tried a few, and there's nothing available I really get along with. And even if there were one that did agree with me, all it would take is one "upgrade" of the software with some new-and-improved b.s. to the UI to screw everything up.
The only way out of GUI hell with email is to remove the GUI entirely, and that's where a 100% text based terminal email client is the solution. A client of that type is the only one where absolutely nothing can screw up how my email looks and functions.
There are several terminal email clients for Linux, but Mutt is always the first one mentioned because it works well.
Whether it's Mutt I go with or something else, it's not so much the client that matters as does what happens before the client is launched. In Thunderbird 60, I have plugins that handle all the regex filtering, sorting and everything else within the client. With a terminal email client, things like filtering have to be handled outside the client first. There's a learning curve with this stuff, to be sure.
Is it worth it to go through the hassle of figuring this stuff out? Yes. Once done, I then have an email environment a) doesn't change unless I want it to, b) looks/functions exactly the same no matter what computer box I'm using, and c) will continue to look/function the same with newer versions of Linux in the future.
The first emails I ever sent were done using a terminal
Sort of.
My first online experience wasn't internet. It was Bulletin Board Systems a.k.a. BBSes. I'm not going to explain what those are. See BBS: The Documentary if you want to know more. The overwhelming majority of those systems were MS-DOS based. The PC I had at the time I was using BBSes had MS-DOS and Windows 3.1.
To get on a BBS, I would usually exit Windows, launch a DOS BBS client, the software would dial the phone number of the BBS, I'd connect and do whatever. Sometimes I would write messages to other people.
Don't ask me what the first message was that I wrote to somebody else, because I absolutely don't remember. In fact, I don't even remember which BBS it was where I wrote my first message.
I do remember that the first electronic message I ever wrote to somebody else was on a BBS using a PC with DOS. I know a PC technically isn't a terminal, but whatever, close enough. The point is that everything was text mode only. DOS client, no GUI, no mouse, just text. The only thing that could be considered fancy were BBSes that had a message editor like IceEdit that took advantage of ANSI colors. Messages themselves were plain text, but the editor used a very basic theme that used ANSI colors to look cool.
What is funny and ironic is that if I commit to using internet email using something like Mutt, that's basically the same as the DOS BBS messaging experience. In fact, I could, if I wanted to, recreate the BBS IceEdit look with Mutt. Not that hard to do. This makes me wonder if anybody has made a BBS-like IceEdit theme for Mutt. Maybe? Who knows.
Nostalgia is not the driving factor for wanting to switch to terminal based email. The fact I can make it look BBS-like is just a bonus. I know I can't run Thunderbird 60 forever, so if I can get my email working to my liking with something like Mutt, I eliminate the GUI hell problem. At least for email.