On Mon, Dec 08, 2014 at 06:33:40PM +0000, John Long wrote: > On Mon, Dec 08, 2014 at 03:19:55PM +0000, Chris Green wrote: > > I have been using mutt for many, many years with a local (Unix style) > > mail spool. Mail is delivered to my system by SMTP (postfix locally). > > > > At the moment to access my mail remotely I ssh into the server and run > > mutt. > > I suspect many people do this. I do this. > > > This works well in general but there are some disadvantages, in > > particular the 'v' command to access and view HTML, PDF and other > > graphical attachments doesn't work because, of course, there's no GUI > > access to the machine where I'm reading the mail. > > Do you not have X-forwarding set or is there some other problem? I have a > shell account that doesn't allow X forwarding so maybe you're in a situation > like that. If it's your box it might be worth changing one line in the sshd > config. > I could connect with X forwarding but I don't really see how it would help. I just tried it with an HTML E-Mail, it doesn't find the file because it sees Firefox already running on the local machine and tries to use that. Also Firefox across an internet connection is impossibly slow.
> > It's also a bit annoying simply saving attachments and then realising > > they're on the remote machine. > > scp or rsync the file to your local box? Presumably you are reading mail > from a remote box for other reasons that are beneficial, or maybe you should > just run it locally. > Yes, if I really need to see what's in the file I do rsync it across but for the casual look at something that's a lot of hassle. I'm reading remotely usually because I'm a long way away, e.g. in London (home is Suffolk) or on a boat in France. > > So, I'm wondering if using IMAP would make my life easier. I would > > run Dovecot I expect. If I do this do things become more transparent > > to a remote mutt? > > I don't see how IMAP helps. What exactly is the difference in terms of how > you read mail and where the apps run as opposed to POP? The only thing IMAP > does it make you rely on a remote mail server. I never use IMAP unless they > don't serve POP. I know one mail provider that doesn't honor POP delete > requests so to avoid leaving 100,000 emails on their server that I can't > delete I use IMAP with them. Everywhere else, POP. I'd rather rely on my own > email storage. > I wondered if, when using IMAP, mutt will store the temporary HTML for passing to Firefox on the local machine rather than the remote machine. One would expect it to somehow. > > E.g. if I want to view an HTML E-Mail in Firefox (default browser) > > instead of within mutt (using lynx) can I just do 'v' followed by > > selecting the HTML attachment as I would when running mutt locally on > > the machine where mail is hosted? > > Maybe. I don't see why not. Presumably if an X app starts and you have > forwarding set it should just work. Personally any HTML mail I can't read in > mutt gets binned. If I get documents like PDFs I just save them on /tmp on > the remote box and then use a PDF reader over X. > No, as I said I just tried it and it doesn't work because Firefox is too clever and uses the local Firefox rather than the remote one so the file is in the wrong place. -- Chris Green
