My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues

[boB Stepp]

On Sun, Jan 24, 2021 at 08:40:25PM -0800, Felix Finch wrote:
>On 20210124, boB Stepp wrote:
>
>>1) Mutt erratically loses connection with Gmail and I have to manually reconnect.  Sometimes this happens rather frequently as in multiple instances within an hour.  I am confident it is not my Internet connection, which is normally quite stable and fast.  For instance my streaming music is never interrupted, the family's TV shows continue unimpeded, etc., but my connectivity to Gmail is interrupted randomly.  If I have both Mutt and the web interface open, Mutt has its interruptions while the Gmail web interface appears to be updating normally.
>
>I had this problem after my ex-employer switched to a Lookout mail system.  Sometimes mutt would stay connected for several days, then disconnect within seconds or minutes on every re-open until I gave up and waited an hour or two before connecting again, stable for hours.  This was a pretty constant pattern for several years for various versions of both mutt and neomutt under Ubunto 18.04 and 20.04.

I have been experimenting.  I wondered if I went to a more recent version
of Mutt if any of my issues would go away, particularly this one.  I don't
have much experience with snap packages, but found that they had Mutt 2.0.3
available, so I gave it a go.  After two days of use this issue did not
happen.  Nor did the issue of read Gmail messages being displayed as unread
rear its head.  But the snap package is a confined snap, which led to a
bunch of irritations since I could not escape from its confines to do
"normal" things.  Research did not reveal any workarounds, so I searched
for an "easy" way to get the latest, greatest Mutt, v. 2.0.5.  Heavy sigh.
Compiling from source seemed to be the only way.

I tried this once before with mixed results.  Cameron was right!  It gets
easier with practice.  I now have Mutt 2.0.5 successfully running.  And so
far things seem to be working very well indeed!

Still looking into how to best handle some of these html emails, but I
think I now have that nuked out, too.  Thanks to everyone that offered
suggestions!

-- 
Wishing you only the best,

boB Stepp