One of my favorite developer tool companies in the world is Charm. So I was blown away when they said they were rethinking how email could be sent using the terminal.<p>Pop is a Text-based User Interface (TUI) that allows you to send emails without having to switch context from your command-line interface.<p>Here's why I'm obsessed with Pop:<p>1. You can write an email body with AI<p>2. You can easily install using Homebrew<p>3. You can do some really powerful stuff like generating a PDF and sending an invoice via email entirely from the command line<p>The email sending part is taken care by Resend, another developer-first product, which makes it the perfect integration for this.<p>As a developer, I live in the terminal. And I would love to hear how other developers feel about this. We would love to hear your ideas, experiences, and feedback.
You can also send email from your terminal using a traditional mail agent like mutt, which also installs via homebrew, but doesn’t require a proprietary API key to send email. Mutt will happily send email as your Gmail user. Mutt can also <i>read</i> email, so if you really live in the terminal it can do it all.<p><a href="https://www.makeuseof.com/install-configure-mutt-with-gmail-on-linux/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.makeuseof.com/install-configure-mutt-with-gmail-...</a>
As other's have pointed out, sending emails from the command line is a solved problem [1]:<p><pre><code> sendmail user@example.com < email.txt
mail -s "Test Subject" user@example.com < body.txt
</code></pre>
What keeps me from actually using this, is the lack of Address Book, as I don't memorize email addresses from all my friends and colleagues. Any suggestions on how to integrate my Gmail Address book into a command line workflow?<p>[1] <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57410259/how-to-send-an-email-using-sendmail-command-in-linux" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57410259/how-to-send-an-...</a>
> The email sending part is taken care by Resend, another developer-first product, which makes it the perfect integration for this.<p>Please add a disclaimer that you're one of the founders of Resend. I had no idea before clicking on your profile.
What is the problem with the mail command ? Or with some msmtp ?<p>Except that with "standard" mail you only need a provider or self-hosted server, and not a RESEND_KEY<p>To me, it looks like "reinventing the wheel"... Did I miss something ?<p>BTW: content generation (AI, email) is not email sending, so you can still generate content with other tools and send it with a simple "mail" command
> To use pop, you will need a RESEND_API_KEY.<p>NOPE. no thank you. cURL can already do this:<p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14722556/using-curl-to-send-email" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14722556/using-curl-to-s...</a>
telnet host port<p>ehlo mailback<p>mail from: myemail@somewhere.com<p>rcpt to: whoever@anywhere.com<p>data<p>mail from: "my name" <myemail@somewhere.com><p>rcpt to: "their name" <whoever@anywhere.com><p>subject: whatever<p>mail text goes here but don't forget an empty line between subject line and this line (as a separator of header and body)<p>and here<p>and end mail text by a single dot in a single line
like this<p>.<p>quit<p>for attachments or other advanced features you can use mutt, pine, or any other mail app. you can also do:<p>cat mail-text.txt | mail -s "subject goes here" whoever@anywhere.com
I typically love things from charm bracelet. They make phenomenally good looking TUIs. For that alone I will try to work with this. However, I do agree that there is a tendency in many of the projects to lean on unnecessary servers by default. For example, to have a local glow experience, you have to edit the config to not send your data (encrypted of course, which is good) to a centralized server.<p>I'm going to contradict myself here, but soft-serve is also phenomenal, but only works with self hosted git, but not gitlab. This is great (as said before, cloud should not be default) but sometimes you want to connect to a well known standard git server like gitlab.<p>Anyway, this looks great, despite the existence of aerc, etc. I think it's a welcome addition, but if the additionally API key can be removed, and if it can work with complicated emails like Oath 2 and Microsoft office webmail, it will likely take off.
Is at inevitable characteristic of people interested in software to ignore reliable/existing/"boring" tools and reinvent the wheel? I can see the benefit as a learning experience, but a lot of these diy efforts accidentally become popular to the detriment of better tools.
The tool certainly presents an appealing design, however I am unsure of the necessity of its interactive features.<p>It mixes several concerns that I would typically assign to separate applications, such as fzf and $EDITOR.
In the linux and mac console (via brew) there is also swaks - a simple tool for sending e-mails.<p>echo "mail body" | swaks -t mail@to -s server -tls -a LOGIN -au mail_login -ap password --from from@mail --h-Subject subject --body -<p>and mail is send ;-)
Resend seems like it might be unnecessary and overkill. Why not just send mail through your mail provider directly? Or is this more about sending email campaigns from the CLI?
I'd love to see something like oh-my-zsh but for stuff like this, because there are a ton of day-to-day utilities I'd like to use in the terminal, but I don't have time to track them all down and configure them.<p>For instance, I'd love to see a good to-do list. I've tried a couple but they underwhelmed me.
If the purpose is learning, really cool, am sure you learned plenty.
Otherwise, there are already so many CLI mail tools, would really appreciate, if you could tell us, why use this one instead of the established ones. Thanks!
you can also send mails with curl via cli <a href="https://everything.curl.dev/usingcurl/smtp" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://everything.curl.dev/usingcurl/smtp</a>