Hi,
Dennis Robertson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on Tue, 20 Jun 2000:
> Before I give up and retire hurt to netscape can anyone tell me in words
> of one syllable how to create mailboxes that work.
Save an existing mail message to a non-existing mail folder (mailbox),
Mutt will automatically create the folder if it doesn't exist yet.
If you're using mbox format (the "standard" unix mail folder format,
single file), you could just do "touch mailbox_name" to create an empty
folder.
> I get the message
> from mutt that every one of the "mailboxes" I have designated is not a
> mailbox, even though I can see that procmail has delivered to them. I
> have read the manual at 3.11 and am none the wiser.
Mutt auto-detects the folder type of any mail folder you try to open.
It recognises 4 folder types: mbox, MMDF (close to mbox), Maildir and
MH. Maildir and MH are single-file-per-message type formats, ie. the
actual folder is a directory which has specific contents.
Assuming you're using mbox (you don't say, but it's the most common
format, Netscape uses it and procmail by default does too)... Take
a look at one of those folder files with a page viewer. The first
five characters of the file should be "From " (From + space). If
they are not, then the folder format is not valid mbox. procmail
likely will not care, if the file exists it will happily append new
messages at the end. Mutt however has to read the folder from the
beginning. As a safe-guard against accidents, it will not try to parse
any random text file as mailbox, that's why the "From " check.
If the file doesn't begin with "From ", then you need to re-create a
valid mbox. It could be just that the file has some leading junk line
or something, which you could remove with a text editor. Or you could
use something like "formail -ds" to recreate valid mbox folders, since
that doesn't assume strict mbox format for messages, but the output
will be in valid mbox format.
If the file *does* begin with a "From ", could you copy/paste the first
two or three lines for us to see?
Regards,
Mikko
--
// Mikko Hänninen, aka. Wizzu // [EMAIL PROTECTED] // http://www.iki.fi/wiz/
// The Corrs list maintainer // net.freak // DALnet IRC operator /
// Interests: roleplaying, Linux, the Net, fantasy & scifi, the Corrs /
"Do you have a backup of the data you used to have on this disk?"
