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I've stumbled on a terminal email program mutt days before. And I thought sending / receiving emails from command-line is really cool.

But besides 'cool', what's the benefit of using it instead of other email client such as Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird?

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  • It works on very low bandwidth connections. I have used it on 9600bp/s
    – Zoredache
    Apr 18, 2012 at 7:27
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    I'm using Mutt over IMAP, and aside from "geek factor" it doesn't really add much. In fact, it's much harder to use in some cases. It still wins over Thunderbird (2nd place) because it starts up really, really fast (compared to 15 seconds for Tb), and works well over SSH. Apr 18, 2012 at 7:37

2 Answers 2

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  • It's very lightweight, and to many, the heavier GUI clients don't add much function in reality.
  • Full keyboard navigation is efficient and comfortable to many.
  • It can be used over SSH to easily and securely check email from foreign locations, without the extra overhead of transferring graphical data, setting up VNC/X forwarding/etc.

The question could as well be: "what does Outlook/Thunderbird/Mail actually add to the function of mutt?". There are also other text-based email clients that are quite popular. They simply blend well into many people's workflow. It's not for everyone, apparently, but neither are graphical clients.

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It's mainly used for its (very) low memory footprint, compactness and the fact that it is a fairly usable mail user agent that doesn't require any GUI. This makes it ideal for simple and very low-end systems or systems with a very low bandwidth. Furthermore, it allows you to run it from an SSH-session without having to install an X server and it's highly customizable to the user's preferences.

However, mail clients like this are in decline since low-end systems today are the ultra-high-end systems of the time programs like mutt were initially created.

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