Mutt

Raised as a usability problem by 27 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2010–2024), in 25 threads.

People raised many different problems with Mutt, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 29 complaints

Too much friction when the commenter tried Mutt years ago2024-01-19
HTML-only emails require launching a browser tab each time, too slow and cumbersome2023-02-06
Viewing HTML emails takes too much time fiddling in the TUI and risks missing emails2022-09-12
Confirmation links break in terminal mail client, forcing manual copy, reformatting and pasting into browser2022-08-25
UI freezes for long periods with large mailboxes using IMAP2022-06-10
Plain-text emails sent from text mail clients display badly for recipients, wrapping and quoting break2022-06-10
Deleted emails stay listed but can't be navigated to for undelete; PgDown jumps to next email2022-06-10
Takes about a week of tweaking to set up2022-04-09
Mutt is a drag to use and a poor fit for how the user wants to handle mail2021-09-19
Finding the unsubscribe link in HTML-only emails is hard sometimes2020-08-16
Configuration is very arcane and monolithic, making setup slow2020-08-16
Cannot pipe file paths to external programs, forcing a roundabout multi-step workaround2020-08-16
Could never get head around mutt, so it was hard to learn and use2019-07-08
No easy way to autocomplete addresses when typing an email2019-06-04
Hangs and loses read/unread changes when the IMAP connection flaps2019-06-04
Auto-configuration picks an expired PGP key instead of the current one2018-10-02
Defaults to nano for writing emails, which may confuse people2018-09-01
Mutt blocks the email until the helper app closes, so attachments can't be viewed alongside the text2017-06-16
Very difficult to customize beyond author's original intentions2017-02-07
Not always packaged with a config, and confusing at first2016-12-22
Network issues lock up the interface when using IMAP2016-09-23
Steep learning curve; initially frustrating for new users to operate2016-08-20
Hours of tuning config settings and remembering dozens of idiosyncrasies is a constant pain2016-04-05
Finding little-used commands is hard without a visible menu2015-12-01
Keyboard-only use is hard because folder switching has no shortcut the commenter can find2015-09-08
Startup re-fetches and re-indexes whole IMAP inbox; multiple accounts messy2013-09-09
Search and mailbox operations slow down noticeably with over 10k messages2013-05-04
Searching through tens to hundreds of thousands of messages is slow2012-10-02
Each message must load over IMAP, so reading through many messages is slow2010-06-29