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 it 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.

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Published 2025 Nov 25