This is a both a suggestion for a message pattern matching facility which currently isn't implemented, and a usage question about how to use the existing capabilities of mutt more efficiently.
I subscribe to many (probably too many) mailing lists. Most get automatically sorted by procmail to their own mail files. Some of these folders quietly accumulate hundreds, thousands, and in one case tens of thousands of messages over the course of months or years. Every so often I take a look at these and try to keep some of the messages and get rid of the rest. Most of the messages in such mail folders are going to be deleted unread. I have found that while targeted subject or author searches are useful, my usual tool for identifying what I want to read is the Mark I eyeball--a quick scan over an index screen with a threaded subject listing, with a few quick previews is usually enough to identify what I want to keep. Manually deleting each unwanted message or thread is fine when deleting on the order of tens or dozens of unwanted messages/threads. However, this gets tedious when I want to delete hundreds of messages/threads. In this case, the ~U pattern is my friend, and it isn't too much of a problem to go through a few screenfuls of messages, pick out the ones to save, and delete the other several hundred unread messages. Where my current methods break down is dealing with mail files with thousands of unread messages. I have found that it isn't practical to do even a cursory scan in one sitting of all of the message index displays before discarding all of the unread messages (~U). In that case I either give up and get of all the old messages, perhaps losing something that I might want to read, or just continue to let messages accumulate without trimming significantly. While mutt easily handles mail files with tens of thousands of messages, and tens or hundreds of megabytes (given sufficient tmp file space), I don't really like letting things get that big without cleaning it out. I can scan a portion of the unread messages in one session, so what I would like to be able to is to match, in some fashion, "the messages that I have scanned". One possibility would be a pattern, say "~I", which would match all messages currently displayed in the Mutt index display. Then I could bind a key sequence to something like "delete-pattern ~I ~U" and scan and delete messages a screenful at a time. My "~I" pattern doesn't seem to be currently implemented in Mutt, so I'll throw it out as a suggestion. How do the rest of you handle cleaning out really big mail folders? Thanks, -- Wayne Chapeskie GnuPG/PGP KeyID: 0xB9D2D272
