Using Maildirs, messages have 0 lines
Even in the latest (beta) version, mutt displays the size of all messages as 0 if they are in a Maildir. I looked at the FAQ and it has a workaround that uses procmail to insert a Lines: header, but I'm wondering if there's a less kludgy way to do this. Wouldn't it be relatively easy to patch mutt so that it displays bytes instead of lines? In a Maildir, it only takes a simple stat() operation to find the size of a message. I'm more used to seeing bytes anyway since I come from using pine...
Any good mbox-Maildir conversion tool?
[Summary: Is there a simple mbox-Maildir conversion tool that preserves the Replied, Seen, Trashed and old/new status of the messages?] --- I've looked through 3 different mbox-Maildir conversion tools (http://www.qmail.org/top.html#maildir), but none of them seem to address the problem of preserving message flags. In an mbox, message flags (Read, Deleted etc.) are stored as headers. pine and mutt (I'm guessing POP/IMAP does something similar; correct me if I'm wrong, since I don't use POP/IMAP) can set these headers to indicate various flags: Status: RO X-Status: AD A = message has been Replied to R = message has been Seen D = message is marked to be Trashed O = message is old (Any other flags I missed? Those are all the ones that show up in Status: or X-Status: in my 10009 message mailbox.) From reading the Maildir specification (http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html), I gather that this is the conversion protocol: 1. The message should be placed in new/ unless O is set, in which case it should be placed in cur/. 2. The flags ARD should be converted to RST in the maildir filename, if the file is in cur/. I also think that these maildir conversion utilities are written too complex, which makes it harder to incorporate them into one-liner shell scripts. The ideal interface to a maildir conversion program could be like this: mbox2maildir Mailbox ~/Maildir which reads the mailbox from standard input, and takes the first argument as the path to the Maildir. Even though this can only convert one mailbox at a time, someone can just do for x in /var/spool/mail/* to mass-convert mailboxes. Thoughts? Is there a mbox-Maildir conversion utility that has the qualities I described, or should I consider writing one myself? P.S. How should the following header be interpreted? Note the doubled From line. I have three messages like that in my 10012 message mailbox; one of the mbox-Maildir conversion utilities I tried made that into two messages (the first one being blank). I'm guessing that since there was no blank line after the first From line, it should have known better. From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fri Apr 14 14:05:59 2000 From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fri Apr 14 14:05:59 2000 X-UIDL: cd2063b7269c3a7a8d7faaf20cc13632 Return-Path: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Any good mbox-Maildir conversion tool?
On Tue, 25 Dec 2001, Jeremy Blosser wrote: [Summary: Is there a simple mbox-Maildir conversion tool that preserves the Replied, Seen, Trashed and old/new status of the messages?] --- Yes, use mutt itself. 1) mutt -f mbox 2) tag all 3) tag copy/save to new maildir Nice. It preserved all the flags, and also added the Lines: header. Is there a way I can do this from the command line, though? I need to automate a lot of mailbox conversions...
Re: Using Maildirs, messages have 0 lines
On Tue, 25 Dec 2001, Philip Mak wrote:
Wouldn't it be relatively easy to patch mutt so that it displays bytes
instead of lines? In a Maildir, it only takes a simple stat() operation to
find the size of a message. I'm more used to seeing bytes anyway since I
come from using pine...
Never mind, I figured it out. Putting this in the .muttrc file makes mutt
display bytes instead of lines:
set index_format=%4C %Z %{%b %d} %-15.15L (%4c) %s
I think this is the easiest solution to the Maildir lines problem,
assuming that the user doesn't mind seeing bytes instead.
Perfect mbox to Maildir converter
I wrote an mbox to Maildir script that I think is better than the other
alternatives out there, assuming that the mbox uses Status: RO and
X-Status: ADF headers to keep track of message flags (pine, mutt, and I
think UW-IMAP do this).
The main design goals of this script are Simplicity and Correctness.
Usage is simple:
[pmak@lina pmak]$ ls -l mbox
-rw---1 pmak pmak 152548699 Dec 25 04:43 mbox
[pmak@lina pmak]$ ./perfect_maildir Maildir mbox
Inserted 10011 messages into maildir Maildir in 35 seconds
On an AMD Duron 1GHz, my script can process about 280 messages per second.
perfect_maildir does not attempt to find all the mbox files in a directory
and convert them; I think that's better handled by a shell script such as
this (untested):
su
cd /var/spool/mail
for x in '*'; do
maildirmake ~$x/Maildir
perfect_maildir ~$x/Maildir $x
chown -R $x ~$x/Maildir
chgrp -R mail ~$x/Maildir
done
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Simple but Perfect mbox to Maildir converter v0.1
# by Philip Mak [EMAIL PROTECTED]
# Usage: perfect_maildir ~/Maildir mbox
# Simple - only converts one mbox (can use script in one-liners)
# Perfect - message Flags/X-Flags are converted; ^From . line is unescaped
# I wrote this script after being unsatisfied with existing mbox to
# maildir converters. By making it Simple, code complexity is kept
# low thus making it easy to program and debug. At the same time,
# since it only converts one mbox at a time, it is perfect for use in
# a shell ``for'' loop (for example).
# As for being Perfect, to the best of my knowledge this script does
# the conversion correctly in all cases; it will translate Status
# and X-Status fields into maildir info, and it correctly detects
# where messages begin and end. (This is only version 0.1 so I may
# have messed something up though. Please send me feedback!)
# NOTE: The MUA ``mutt'' has a bug/feature where in the message index,
# it claims that all maildir messages have 0 lines unless they have a
# Lines: header set. perfect_maildir does not attempt to add the
# Lines: header; you may want to reconfigure ``mutt' to display byte
# size instead of lines instead by adding the following line to your
# ~/.muttrc file:
#
# set index_format=%4C %Z %{%b %d} %-15.15L (%4c) %s
# check for valid arguments
my ($maildir) = @ARGV;
if (!$maildir) {
print STDERR Usage: perfect_maildir ~/Maildir mbox\n;
exit 1;
}
# check for writable maildir
unless (-w $maildir/cur) {
print STDERR Cannot write to $maildir/cur\n;
exit 1;
}
unless (-w $maildir/new) {
print STDERR Cannot write to $maildir/new\n;
exit 1;
}
my $num = 0;
my $time = time;
repeat:
# read header
my $headers = '';
my $flags = '';
my $subject = '';
while (my $line = STDIN) {
# detect end of headers
last if $line eq \n;
# strip From line from header
$headers .= $line unless $line =~ /^From ./;
# detect flags
$flags .= $1 if $line =~ /^Status: ([A-Z]+)/;
$flags .= $1 if $line =~ /^X-Status: ([A-Z]+)/;
$subject = $1 if $line =~ /^Subject: (.*)$/;
}
$num++;
# open output file
my $file;
if ($flags =~ /O/) {
$file = $maildir/cur/$time.$num.$ENV{HOSTNAME};
my $extra = '';
$extra .= 'F' if $flags =~ /F/; # flagged
$extra .= 'R' if $flags =~ /A/; # replied
$extra .= 'S' if $flags =~ /R/; # seen
$extra .= 'T' if $flags =~ /D/; # trashed
$file .= :2,$extra if $extra;
} else {
$file = $maildir/new/$time.$num.$ENV{HOSTNAME};
}
# filter out the DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA message
$file = '/dev/null' if ($num == 1 and $subject eq DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER
INTERNAL DATA);
open(FILE, $file);
print FILE $headers\n;
while (my $line = STDIN) {
# detect end of message
last if $line =~ /^From ./;
# unescape From
$line =~ s/^From (.)/From $1/;
print FILE $line;
}
close(FILE);
goto repeat unless eof(STDIN);
my $elapsed = time - $time;
print Inserted $num messages into maildir $maildir in $elapsed seconds\n;
Good vim configuration?
I'm used to using pine's editor, which handles filling of paragraphs (even if they start with due to quoting) fairly nicely. How can I achieve the same thing in vi? I'd like to be able to bind a key such that when I press it, it automatically refills the current paragraph smartly. Some automatic line wrapping would be nice, too... I'm wondering what configurations for .vimrc do you guys use for use with mutt?
Re: Good vim configuration?
I did some digging around Google and came up with this:
[pmak@lina pmak]$ cat .muttvimrc
map C-J {gq} # Ctrl+J rejustifies current paragraph
set formatoptions=tcroqv# see :help formatoptions
set comments=nb: # rejustify quoted text correctly
set tw=75 # wrap lines to 75 chars
[pmak@lina pmak]$ egrep editor .muttrc
# load a special vimrc when starting vim from mutt
# and start the cursor at the end of the headers
set editor=vim -u ~/.muttvimrc +/^$
It doesn't seem to work with all recent versions of VIM, though. It's very
weird---version 6.0z Beta (2001 Mar 24) seems to ignore whatever I put in
set comments. On version 6.0 (2001 Sep 26), the set comments thing
works but I can't map any control keys for some reason (!). I'm still
trying to figure that out.
But the reformatting of lines, even ones with multiple levels of quoted
text, seems to work.
Re: Good vim configuration?
I tinkered around a bit more and came up with this code for making Ctrl+J
(justify paragraph) work, even with quoted text.
It assumes that ^[ ]*$ is the paragraph separator, meaning that any line
which is blank or only contains '' and ' ' separates a paragraph. Here is
the full code for making Ctrl+J work:
[pmak@lina pmak]$ cat .muttvimrc
function! PrevPara()
if !search(^[ ]*$, 'bW')
1
endif
endfunction
function! NextPara()
if !search(^[ ]*$, 'W')
$
endif
endfunction
set formatoptions=tcqv
set comments=nb:
set tw=75
set cpo-=
map { :call PrevPara()ENTER
map } :call NextPara()ENTER
map C-J {gq}j
[pmak@lina pmak]$ egrep editor .muttrc
set editor=vim -u ~/.muttvimrc +/^$
I'll keep refining this as I use it more and find any quirks. (If anyone
here actually uses my code and has comments please let me know. :)
BTW, regarding those other suggestions involving binding fmt or par
to a key, isn't it slow to fork a process every time you press the
rejustify key, or is that overhead negligible?
Re: Mutt can not cooperate with mozilla
On Wed, 26 Dec 2001, Charles Jie wrote: In my .mailcap: text/html; mozilla -remote openurl\(file:%s\) always fails because %s is expanded as '' The quotes are the problem because they mix up in the URL. How about this? text/html; mozilla -remote openurl\(file:`echo %s | sed s/^'\(.*\)'$/\1/`\) sed s/^'\(.*\)'$/\1/ will read 'something' from standard input and write it to standard output without the single quotes.
View HTML files when running mutt through SSH
I had an interesting little idea on how to view HTML files on my desktop web browser, even though I'm running mutt through SSH! I put this in my .mailcap: text/html; opera %s opera is a simple perl script to rename the attachment to a value that is guaranteed to be unique (time_pid.html), invoke sz on the file (using the ZMODEM protocol to send the file to my computer, since my ssh client supports ZMODEM), and then print a special string that gets picked up by a trigger in my SSH client, which invokes my web browser to open the file. So, just by viewing the attachment in mutt, I can have it show up on my web browser, over SSH. I found this trick to be more interesting than useful, though; I rarely have a need to view bloated HTML e-mail. It's also a bit slow.
Escaping From separator line in an mbox
Regarding the From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Wed Jun 06 18:44:53 2001 lines in an mbox file... What is the regular expression for matching whether the line in an mbox file is the beginning of a new message? What is the regular expression for matching lines like From that should have the removed before being displayed? I've been trying to figure it out, but I couldn't find an RFC on it. It seems to be more complicated than simply /^From ./. This is what I've come up with so far, but I may be wrong: /^From (\s*[^ ]+\s+... ... .. ..:..:.. )/ I have the feeling that not all MUAs/MTAs are consistent in how they handle this, because e.g. when I send an e-mail to a mailing list that has a line beginning with From, when I get my message back it turns into From (when being displayed by the MUA to me)! Detecting the former is more important than the latter, since if I get the latter wrong, it just means an extra or a missing in the message, which doesn't matter unless it was a binary encoded file that had From at the beginning of a line (unlikely). But if I get the former wrong, then a whole message can get messed up.
Re: Escaping From separator line in an mbox
On Wed, 26 Dec 2001, David T-G wrote: Your MDA will also escape any ^From_ in the body to avoid confusion with a message separator line -- if it's delivering to an mbox file. That doesn't seem to be true. For example, in one of my sent-mail files from pine, I saw this line (there was no before it): From 66.28.28.22: Destination Host Unreachable pine knows not to recognize it as a From line, so I'm thinking that pine makes sure that it also has a date like Mon Nov 26 06:33:50 2001 on it. My current best guess for a regexp to match a message separator line is this: /^From (\s*[^ ]+\s+... ... .. ..:..:.. )/ but I'm wondering if there might be obscure cases in which it breaks.
Dealing with bad MIME types
Someone sent me an attachment called designview.jpg with MIME type of application/octet-stream. Since it wasn't image/jpg or image/jpeg, mutt didn't know how to view it correctly. How could I have made mutt treat that as image/jpg (by making it look at the filename extension, perhaps) despite the incorrect MIME type?
Free code! Integrate mutt through SSH with your desktop
Here's a beta version of code that I made for myself. My desktop is a
Windows system, but I run mutt through SSH. I'd like to be able to have
HTML and image attachments come up directly on my web browser, so I made
this code.
Prerequisites:
- mutt (of course!)
- SecureCRT SSH client (or other SSH client with ZMODEM and Visual Basic
scripting support; opera.vbs may need minor modifications to work with
other clients)
- ZMODEM installed on your UNIX system as the sz command
To install it, put opera.pl in ~/bin/opera and chmod 755. Then, put this
into your ~/.mailcap (customize to your liking):
text/html; opera html %s
image/gif; opera gif %s
image/jpg; opera jpg %s
image/jpeg; opera jpg %s
image/pjpeg; opera jpg %s
image/png; opera png %s
The script called opera will rename the attachment file to a unique
value ($ARGV[0] is the extension that it will use), and then execute the
sz command to send the file to your SSH client. After doing so, it will
print $filename\n$passphrase\n.
On your SSH client, you will need to have opera.vbs running. SecureCRT can
be set to always run this script automatically if you configure it in
Options-Session Options-Connection-Login Scripts.
opera.vbs will listen for $passphrase and when it hears it, it will open
the file in $path/$filename (be sure that you have set Windows to know
to use your favorite program to open .JPG, .PNG, .GIF, .HTML).
You probably want to change $passphrase in opera.pl and opera.vbs (they
must match) to some secret value, and don't set it to be world readable.
Another hint if you have a slow link: For faster download of certain files
e.g. (HTML, DOC, XLS), in SecureCRT go to Options-Session
Options-Connection-SSH2-Compression, and check Use compression and
crank Compression level up to 9.
If anyone uses this/improves on it, let me know. :)
For loading HTML attachments, I'm thinking it might be useful to load it
in lynx first, and then have the option of opening it on my desktop
instead if lynx is inadequate... is there a way to define multiple
possible actions for a single MIME type?
I also wonder if I can make it so that when I click a mailto:; link in my
desktop web browser, it goes to mutt and automatically starts composing a
message. I probably won't bother doing this though, because I'm not
familiar with VBScript programming, and there's also the problem of how to
interface with mutt - what if it's not running, what if it's in the middle
of composing another message, etc.
#!/usr/bin/perl
# This program is free software under the GNU Public License.
# See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html for details.
# A wrapper script intended for use in .mailcap in order to send
# files to the desktop web browser when running applications
# over SSH or telnet. The SSH/telnet client must have special
# programming instructions in order for this to work.
use strict;
use File::Basename;
my $passphrase = SPECIAL TRIGGER STRING;
# Check for valid command line arguments
die Usage: opera extension filename unless @ARGV == 2;
my ($ext, $file) = @ARGV;
die Cannot read/write $file unless (-R $file -W $file);
# Generate new unique filename with correct extension
my $dirname = dirname($file);
my $time = time;
my $newbase = dl_${time}_$$.$ext;
my $newfile = $dirname/$newbase;
rename($file, $newfile) || die Cannot rename $file to $newfile;
# Upload file to desktop and delete it locally
system(sz $newfile);
unlink $newfile;
# Send command string to client, triggering it to open the file
print $newbase\n$passphrase\n;
opera.vbs.gz
Description: gzipped .VBS script; run in SecureCRT
Moving between folders
Is there a way to make it so that when I use the c command to change to a different folder, the original one remains open? My ~/Maildir/ folder has 1 messages, and my =sent folder has 6000 messages, so it's slow to switch between them if they get closed each time I switch. BTW, I just noticed a minor bug: If I'm in my sent mail folder and I compose a message, it will say Mailbox was externally modified. Flags may be wrong. due to it writing a new message into the sent mail folder.
Re: mutt opens folders too slowly? (Re: Mutt is great!)
* Cleber S. Mori [EMAIL PROTECTED] [011207 22:32]: Mutt have just one problem. It is slow to open folders, because it does not cache them. Pine did it, and it feels much more fast. I don't know if there is a option for that, but I believe not. mutt takes 7 seconds to open my 1 message inbox (Maildir). pine takes 2 seconds.
Re: Escaping From separator line in an mbox
On Thu, 27 Dec 2001, Matthew D. Fuller wrote: Mutt, I guess, outsmarts the mbox by reading Content-Length:, which you'd pretty much have to do I guess. To me, it just seems like putting too much trust in the LDA, whatever that may be, but... Then again, why not trust? mbox is fragile as hell anyway, what's one more shaky assumption? ;) Looking in my sent-mail folder from pine that had a message with unescaped From 66.28.28.22: Destination Host Unreachable, it did not have a Content-Length header. Here is the headers for that message: From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sat Nov 10 03:17:28 2001 -0500 Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 03:17:28 -0500 (EST) From: Philip Mak [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: James Ventrillo [EMAIL PROTECTED], Mike Little [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: IP address problems on buildreferrals.com Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: O X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 47 I'm guessing that mutt/pine/etc. use some best effort heuristics to determine when a From line is a message separator. For example: - A message separator only occurs after a blank line. - A message separator contains From , an envelope sender address (as defined in RFC822 appendix d addrspec), whitespace, and a timestamp (weekday month day time [timezone] year). It seems that there is not a reliable mechanism for unescaping From lines; I've found out that if I send a message that says From to myself (using pine with mbox), it will become From in some cases. I'm guessing this is one of those things that should have been standardized, but everyone just did it ad hoc and now it's a mess. man mbox on my system says: In order to avoid mis-interpretation of lines in message bodies which begin with the four characters From, fol lowed by a space character, the character is commonly prepended in front of such lines. It says commonly prepended, which implies that it doesn't have to be. :( So it would seem that for the mbox to Maildir conversion program that I'm writing, the best thing that I can manage is to make it recognize a From line as a message separator based on those two heuristics (preceding blank line, and correct syntax) above.
Re: Using mutt in command line ..
On Thu, 27 Dec 2001, Ivan Castillo Escobar wrote: Somebody can tell me how to write the exact command to send a mail with an attachment using the command line (mutt), without the need to enter the vi editor to write the message body???. I need to use a mutt command to be executed in a UNIX shell ... If you just want to send a text file to someone, you can simply use the standard UNIX mail command: mail -sMy .muttrc file [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~/.muttrc would send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with subject My .muttrc file and send your ~/.muttrc file. It doesn't work with binary files, though. You can probably use mutt to do that somehow but I don't know how.
Bug? Pressing $ when new mail arrives
Scenario: When I press $ to purge the deleted messages in my mailbox, and it asks me: Purge 8 deleted messages? ([yes]/no): and I answer yes, if new mail has arrived that mutt didn't see yet, it will show the new mail and *abort* the purge operation. Is this a bug/is there a workaround for this?
Re: Bug? Pressing $ when new mail arrives
On Thu, 27 Dec 2001, Brian Clark wrote: if new mail has arrived that mutt didn't see yet, it will show the new mail and *abort* the purge operation. Is this a bug/is there a workaround for this? If you don't want to be asked, I think you want this: ### delete ### Type: quadoption ### Default: ask-yes ### Controls whether or not messages are really deleted when closing or ### synchronizing a mailbox. That's not what I was talking about, actually. I was saying that when it asks me Purge 8 deleted messages? ([yes]/no): and I answer yes, it DOES NOT purge the messages if new mail has just arrived.
Writing bullets/lists in vim
Does anyone have a vim configuration to make writing bullets/lists easier? e.g. when I'm writing something like this: --- begin example --- 1. Pick one of the RaQs to be the DNS server. 2. E-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] and ask him for an additional IP for that RaQ. 3. When you get the IP, tell me and I'll set the server to use it. --- end example --- it would be nice if when the line wraps while I'm typing point #2, the cursor starts on column 3 instead of column 0 on the second line.
big mailbox v.s. rotated mailbox; thoughts
I was thinking about the merits of keeping one large mailbox, versus keeping a mailbox that's rotated monthly/quarterly/yearly. Some people prefer to keep one huge mailbox, and some other people prefer to rotate it. I'd like to explore the reasons why people do it one way and not the other. Reasons I keep my mail in one large mailbox: - I'm too lazy to go look up how to rotate my mail. - It's useful to be able to search for every message a specific person has ever sent me. - The only performance degradation that I've noticed as a result of having a 1 message mailbox is that mutt takes 8 seconds to start. However, I run screen anyway (it's useful since my dialup connection disconnects me randomly, too). A l (limit) command executes within 1 second, even on my huge mailbox. Then again, the current performance degradation could get bad when I accumulate another year or two of mail. :) My main complaint against rotated mailboxes is the anomaly that occurs right after a rotation cycle: My folder would be almost empty, and if I want to search for something I'll have to search for it twice - once in the current folder, and once in the previous period's folder. A fine-grained rotation scheme might work better; e.g. I could have a primary folder that holds the last 3 months of messages, and an archive folder that holds everything else. Every day, a cronjob looks through ~/Maildir/cur for individual files that are 3 months old and moves them to ~/mail/old/cur (is file modification time always the same as the time the message was received?). In that case, I have a reasonably small main folder that I can probably find everything I need to in (saves performance over having one huge folder), and if I need to go back further I can access the larger archive folder.
Re: Bug? Pressing $ when new mail arrives
On Thu, 27 Dec 2001, Benjamin Smith wrote:
I was thinking of that too, but since mutt still knows how to mark the
messages to be deleted after the purge, why not delete them after the
check... ?
Good question... Currently the code just does this (in
mbox_sync_mailbox):
/* Check to make sure that the file hasn't changed on disk */
if ((i = mbox_check_mailbox (ctx, index_hint)) == M_NEW_MAIL || i == M_REOPEN
{
/* new mail arrived, or mailbox reopened */
need_sort = i;
rc = i;
goto bail;
}
Hmm... mutt's paradigm is to work gracefully even when there are different
processes accessing the same mailbox at the same time. Let's imagine what
would happen if person 1 and person 2 are both accessing the same mailbox,
and we made mutt continue to expunge the messages even after it detects a
change in the mailbox:
1. Person #1 presses $ and is asked whether to expunge messages.
2. Person #2 deletes a message.
3. Person #2 notices that he deleted the wrong message and wants
to undelete it.
4. Person #1 presses y, causing all deleted messages to be
expunged, including the one that Person #2 wanted to undelete.
I'm guessing that's why the mutt authors coded $ to abort in case of a
mailbox modification; if they just made it blindly not abort, then mutt
would lose some transaction safety.
I think a better way of handling this would be for mutt to remember what
messages were marked as deleted when $ was pressed. If the user then
confirms the deletion but mutt detects a changed mailbox, it should go
read the mailbox again, then delete any messages that were originally
marked as deleted and are still marked as deleted.
I may not be fully aware of any problems in implementing this, though
(maybe my reasoning is flawed somewhere, maybe there's a technical reason
that makes it difficult to implement this, etc.).
mutt loosing D flags
I think I did something recently (it had to do with answering no when mutt asked me whether I wanted to purge deleted messages) that caused mutt to lose track of which messages had D (Deleted) flags on them. Does anyone know what I did, and how to avoid doing it again? I think someone recently said on this mailing list that mutt does not have the ability of saving D (Deleted) flags. It seems odd that mutt doesn't support it, since there seems to exist ways to store these flags (X-Status: D in mbox, or put T flag in filename in Maildir/cur).
Re: problem with timestamps
On Sat, 29 Dec 2001, Andy Spiegl wrote: I hope I can make this clear, when mutt modifies a file (mbox) it doesn't update the timestamps. Sure, I know this problem very well and started a long thread about this, but in the end I was told that it's not a bug, but a feature. I still don't understand why and keep thinking that it's a bug. But there seem to be too many people out there that like that way because a lot of (in my opinion broken) programs make use of it and so it won't be changed. Perhaps your patch should be included in the standard distribution as a user-configurable option?
Re: GPG-PGP
On Mon, 31 Dec 2001, Benjamin Michotte wrote: just to say that I finally win :) I convert 3 friends to use mutt and they're really happy now ;) On Tue, Dec 11, 2001 at 10:18:50PM, Benjamin Michotte wrote: Is it possible to ask mutt sending signed messages in line or must I force my friends to use mutt ? (I try but is difficult ;p) I used mutt a few months ago but gave up on it because I couldn't figure out how to do things that I could easily do with pine. This month I finally had the time to sit down for a few hours and carefully read through the mutt manual so that I could configure everything just how I needed it (remember my earlier posts about configuring vim to do paragraph formatting even with quoted text, viewing images on my desktop by ZMODEM send over ssh, etc.). I think that mutt is a good e-mail client, but the default configuration is sub-optimal (vim doesn't format paragraphs well by default, some of the key bindings are counterintuitive IMHO, etc.). In order for a newer user to get into mutt, he has to be able to use it how he wants. My next mutt project: SSH-before-WWW (inspired by POP-before-SMTP). I have been using ZMODEM to send attachments back to my desktop for saving/displaying, but ZMODEM doesn't work ever since I started running mutt in screen. Instead of using ZMODEM, I'm going to put the files into a directory on my web server; this directory will be protected such that only IP addresses currently logged into my account can view it.
Where's the MAIL FROM line?
Is it possible to see the SMTP MAIL FROM line of a message in my mailbox, or does Maildir format strip that information out before storing it?
Re: big mailbox v.s. rotated mailbox; thoughts
I just had another thought: Might it make sense to store sent mail together with normal messages? A fundamental problem is that mutt's Search feature cannot search over multiple mailboxes. Thus, if I want to review a series of e-mails that I exchanged with someone about a specific topic, then it may be useful to be able to see both sides of the conversation. I'm thinking that it might make sense to keep only *new* mail in ~/Maildir/, though. For me, an e-mail message that I receive may represent something that I have to do (e.g. reply to the e-mail, do what the person in the e-mail told me to do, etc.). So, I could remove messages from my inbox only when I have done the action that is associated with that e-mail. This makes it less likely that I'll forget to do something (which has happened before; I can be quite forgetful at times). So perhaps: - New mail is sent to ~/Maildir/. - Messages that I have sent go to =old. - I save messages to =old when I'm done with them. - A daily cron job scans =old and moves 3-month-old messages into =archive.
Re: Where's the MAIL FROM line?
On Wed, 2 Jan 2002, David T-G wrote: But it's used for message information, no? It becomes the ^From: line, or at least so it appears. That's why it's so easy to fake and so on, too, but it looks like whatever is put there would show up in the header. It's not the ^From: line. For example, when I send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], I think the SMTP transaction goes something like this: $ telnet localhost 25 HELO localhost MAIL FROM:[EMAIL PROTECTED] RCPT TO:[EMAIL PROTECTED] DATA From: Philip Mak [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Mutt Users' List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Where's the MAIL FROM line? Message text goes here. . The MAIL FROM line is not necessarily the same as the ^From: line. In mbox format, the former shows up as From user[@domain] date on the first line of the message, but Maildir format doesn't have that.
Re: Support for Maildir in mutt
On Tue, 1 Jan 2002, Sudhir Kumar wrote: We have qmail installed in our system and the default delivery mechanism is Maildir.How can I configure mutt to read mails from Maildir. Put this in /etc/profile (or equivalent file if your system use something else): MAIL=$HOME/Maildir/ Does mutt support Maildir format natively? If not is there a patch? Yes. All you need to do is let mutt know where to find the Maildir, which you can do using that line in /etc/profile. (Log out and log back in after adding that line, or it won't work.)
Re: To log the time I spend in reading/writing a mail
On Wed, 2 Jan 2002, Charles Jie wrote: Is it possible to have mutt record the time I use to read or write a mail? I hope to know how much time I spend in a folder (a kind of info). Further, I want a timer to alert me when I'm going to run out of the pre-set time for reading or writing a mail. Are the solution there? Or quick solution available? I don't know of any existing solutions, but I can tell you where to start, assuming you can program it yourself. In .muttrc, you can ``set editor=some command''. Change that to run a wrapper script that records the current time, starts your text editor (e.g. pico or vi) in the background, and then keeps monitoring your editor's PID to see if it's still running. If you take too long, then it can write to /dev/yourterminal to tell you that you're taking too long. When it sees that the PID has stopped running, it knows you're finished and it can log the time that you tok. The above method will enable you to see how long it takes you to write a mail, but there's a bit of programming that you'd have to do. As for seeing how long it takes you to read a mail, I think that you can set mutt to use a different program to read a mail; if you do that, you'd be able to use the same method as above. I'm not sure if you can still use the mutt pager and be able to log how long it takes. Of course, you can do anything if you patch mutt's source code, but it will probably be more difficult since you have to write in C instead of perl, and you have to figure out how mutt's source code works first.
Re: To log the time I spend in reading/writing a mail
On Wed, 2 Jan 2002, Thorsten Haude wrote: I've just got used to the built-in pager and thought their combination is not bad. Thus I might not plan to replace it with 'less'. You might try $display_filter. I was thinking about $display_filter... that command is indeed executed when the user *starts* viewing a message, so an external timer program could be hooked there. However, I don't think there's a program that gets execuetd when the user *stops* viewing a message. So it doesn't seem like the total time spent viewing a message can be determined this way.
Re: How to allow mutt accept composing an empty-body mail?
On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 12:37:03PM +0800, Charles Jie wrote: I didn't find suitable setting to make mutt not to abandon composing a mail without content. Help, please. charlie set abort_nosubject=no # allow sending messages without subject set abort_unmodified=no # allow sending messages without body
Re: multipart/alternative and text/html
On Sun, Jan 06, 2002 at 09:21:25PM +0700, budsz wrote: How can I make mutt able to display text/html attachments inline, WITHOUT making it pick text/html (instead of text/plain) when the original message was sent as multipart/alternative? I find the text/html versions to be formatted worse. If you want to make easy pls install metamail, copy mailcap to home directory. I don't understand how that applies to my problem... I already have metamail installed on my system, and my .mailcap file IS in my home directory. BTW, why'd you CC your message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] instead of [EMAIL PROTECTED]?
set mail_check lies
set mail_check configures how often (in seconds) mutt should look for new mail. I have it set to 5, but new e-mail that I receive does *not* show up within 5 seconds. It seems that it only shows up if I press a key in mutt. Does anyone have any ideas?
Re: set mail_check lies
On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 11:18:06AM +0100, René Clerc wrote: | set mail_check configures how often (in seconds) mutt should look | for new mail. I have it set to 5, but new e-mail that I receive does | *not* show up within 5 seconds. | | It seems that it only shows up if I press a key in mutt. Do you have set the $mailboxes directive to look at the correct mailbox(es)? I didn't have $mailboxes set, but I assumed that my inbox (~/Maildir/) would be automatically included... I just tried typing :mailboxes ~/Maildir/ and then sent a message to myself and waited 10 seconds. Again, the message did not show up until I pressed a key in mutt. (Yes, I've made sure that my mail server is not delaying the message.)
Re: set mail_check lies
On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 01:13:59PM +0100, Michael Tatge wrote: Philip Mak muttered: set mail_check configures how often (in seconds) mutt should look for new mail. I have it set to 5, but new e-mail that I receive does *not* show up within 5 seconds. It seems that it only shows up if I press a key in mutt. mailboxes must be set You have to find a balance between $mail_check and $timeout. See sections 4.12. and 6.3.215. of the manual. Thanks. $timeout was the problem; since timeout defaults to 600 seconds, mutt will only check mail every 10 minutes no matter how small $mail_check is, if I don't press a key! I would like to suggest that the phrase See also timeout. or something similar be added to the definition of mail_check in section 6.3 of the manual. Otherwise, someone might not realize that a low value of mail_check may be useless if timeout is set too high.
Customizing mutt to work the way you want!
# Don't ask me to press a key to continue after I did a shell escape
# and came back
set wait_key=no
# Leave a right margin of 1 character when wrapping lines in the pager
set wrapmargin=1
# I don't use PGP. Don't bother verifying peoples' signatures
unset pgp_verify_sig
set alias_file=~/.mail_aliases
# Load personal files; these files are separated so that I can
# distribute my .muttrc file to my other shell accounts or to other
# people
source ~/.mail_aliases
source ~/.muttrc2
Move to the previous paragraph, even in quoted text.
function! PrevPara()
if !search(^[ ]*$, 'bW')
1
endif
endfunction
Move to the next paragraph, even in quoted text.
function! NextPara()
if !search(^[ ]*$, 'W')
$
normal o
endif
endfunction
HasFormatOptions(x)
Return true if format option 'x' is in effect. Take care of no
formatting when 'paste' is set.
function! HasFormatOptions(x)
if paste || (a:x == 2 !autoindent)
return 0
endif
return formatoptions =~ a:x
endfunction
Toggle line wrapping on or off.
function! WrapMode()
if HasFormatOptions(t)
set formatoptions-=t
echo Line wrap turned off.
else
set formatoptions+=t
echo Line wrap turned on.
endif
endfunction
When I press backspace, allow it to go back over to the previous
line, and even past the point where I started inserting.
set bs=indent,eol,start
Consider the '' character as a comment character, which allows vim
to refill quoted paragraphs correctly.
set comments=nb:
Required so that I can write ESC ENTER etc. below
set cpo-=
Auto-wrap text.
Auto-wrap quoted text, inserting automatically as needed.
Allow quoted text to be reformatted.
set formatoptions=tcqv
Wrap lines at 70 characters.
set tw=70
Redefine the { (previous paragraph) key to use my function.
map { :call PrevPara()ENTER
# Redefine the } (next paragraph) key to use my function.
map } :call NextPara()ENTER
# Make Ctrl-J rejustify the current paragraph (in both insert mode and
# command mode).
map C-J {gq}j
imap C-J ESC{gq}j
# Make \ key (in command mode) toggle line wrapping mode.
map \ :call WrapMode()ENTER
# Make Ctrl-K delete the current line like in pine.
imap C-K ESCdd
# I put my name and e-mail address here, since my server hosts
# multiple domain names.
my_hdr From: Philip Mak [EMAIL PROTECTED]
# List e-mail addresses being received by this mailbox, separated by a
# pipe (|).
set [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Good HTML to text converter?
On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 08:50:16PM +0100, Michael Wagner wrote: I have this in my mailcap file: text/html; html2text %s; copiousoutput; nametemplate=%s.html because the output is much better than this lynx or w3m. Try it. The problem that I see with lynx, w3m and links is that the -dump output they produce is not so suited for plain text reading. For one thing, all normal P.../P paragraph text is indented several spaces. If you are looking at an HTML message that uses tables to format things (rather than using tables to tabulate data), you DON'T want table support when it gets converted to text. What is this html2text program that you are using?
Re: Mutt sucks less than the rest
On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 08:59:04PM -0500, Derek D. Martin wrote: Mike L, if you have tricks for figuring out WHICH mozilla window the page will pop up in, I'd like to see that. Yeah, that'd do it, but I'd rather just leave one up and have it use the same one all the time. No need to ENCOURAGE mozilla to leak memory... ;-) Can't you specify a target window name for the new link to open in? I know that when you're writing HTML, you can do something like: A HREF=somepage.html TARGET=windowname and if you put TARGET=windowname for all your links, the links will always open in the same window. Perhaps you can specify a TARGET from the Mozilla command line?
Re: maildir (number of lines in index)
On Tue, Jan 08, 2002 at 02:06:37PM -0600, David wrote:
I did a quick check for maildir in the manual as well as a quick archive
search but couldn't hit what I wanted. I just switched a couple of my
boxes to maildir to deal with NFS not setting mtime and atime properly.
Only trouble so far is that with two new messages I have recieved in
those boxes (all I have gotten in there so far), the number of lines
show up as ( 0), even though the message is not zero-length (when mutt
opens it, in fact, it looks fine).
You can either add a Lines: # header to each message which tells
mutt how many lines the message is.
Alternatively, I just do this:
set index_format=%4C %Z %{%b %d} %-15.15L (%4c) %s
That makes mutt display the size of the message in bytes instead of
lines, which does not rely on the headers. Being a former pine user,
I'm more used to seeing the size of the message in bytes (which also
makes more sense when people send me binary attachments).
Moving (not saving) a message to another folder
I think that it would be nice to have the ability to move (not [S]ave) a message to another folder in a single atomic operation, without having to [$]Synchronize. (Assuming that the current folder is a Maildir, where moving a message is just moving a file.) In my conceptual model of e-mail, I view each message as a task to be done (e.g. I have to reply to the mail, or the mail is telling me to do something, etc.). So, it makes sense for me to keep my inbox clean so that it only contains messages that I still have to do something about. Any messages that I have finished, I move them into my done folder. It would be convenient to be able to use a Move command in mutt that immediately moves the message into the done folder (on the filesystem level, it's just an mv from one Maildir to another) and immediately makes it disappear from the message list of the current folder. Right now, I have to [S]ave then [$]Synchronize, which takes longer. Thoughts?
Re: Moving (not saving) a message to another folder
On Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 07:25:41PM +0100, Adam Byrtek wrote: On Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 01:03:32PM -0500, Philip Mak wrote: So, it makes sense for me to keep my inbox clean so that it only contains messages that I still have to do something about. Any messages that I have finished, I move them into my done folder. folder-hook mbox macro index d 'save-message=archive\n' 'archive message' folder-hook mbox macro pager d 'save-message=archive\n' 'archive message' But I'm not sure is this what are you looking for. If you want to, you could add 'synchronize' at the end of this macro, but I prefer not to - I tend to delete sometimes some mail by mistake. That's not quite what I wanted to do. I wouldn't want to save *every* message to the archive (some messages are not useful to keep around, e.g. spam etc.). Making a hook macro to save the message to the archive mailbox would make it slightly faster, but the synchronize part is also a problem. Right now, in order to make the moved message disappear immediately from the message listing, I would have to synchronize, which would also delete any messages (and also takes a second or two; synchronize is not instantaneous). I suspect what I'm talking about would not be possible without hacking the mutt source code. Anyone have ideas on how to do this (and how many other people are interested in having such a feature? :).
Re: Moving (not saving) a message to another folder
On Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 12:46:03PM -0600, Knute wrote: Right now, in order to make the moved message disappear immediately from the message listing, I would have to synchronize, which would also delete any messages (and also takes a second or two; synchronize is not instantaneous). Have you tried to simply set the color for deleted messages to black on black (or whatever bg color you are using)? Here's what I have in mine: color index black black ~D # Deleted It's quick, easy to set up, and removes it from sight. Then once you are done, you can synchronise your box, and get rid of them. Interesting. That almost does exactly what I wanted, except that it leaves a hole on the screen. I guess I'll use that if I can't come up with anything better. Thanks.
Exporting a message?
How do I save a message to a file (like the [E]xport command in pine) such that all text attachments are included, as well as the headers of the message? The best way I've found is to press [e]dit, then use the :w command in vi to write it out to a file. That takes a few more keystrokes than it should though, and also includes all the headers of the message (instead of just the my_hdr ones).
Re: Exporting a message?
On Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 11:29:57PM -0800, Michael Elkins wrote: How do I save a message to a file (like the [E]xport command in pine) such that all text attachments are included, as well as the headers of the message? If your $mbox_type is set to mbox, then a simple C (copy-message) will do what you want. Otherwise you will need to create a macro like such: macro E index pipe-messagecat and just append the filename you want to the end of the command. It should be macro index E, not macro E index, BTW. (I'm using Maildir, not mbox.) That's a bit better than pressing e and using the vi :w command to save the message. It's still not as good as pine's [E]xport command, though. It will write out all the uninteresting headers of the message (Return-Path, Delivered-To, Received, Message-ID, etc.) rather than only the ones I've defined in the my_hdr configuration option. When I export a message, I'm doing it for the purpose of printing it or including it in a document I'm writing so I wouldn't want all those extra headers. I don't suppose there's a command like pipe-message, except that it filters headers (the header filtering code is already available in the pager, after all)? Or would I have to write an external header filtering program and then do something like: macro index E pipe-message perl filter_header.pl which isn't exactly the optimal solution, since an external program does not have ready access to my configuration file my_hdr settings, but would work I suppose.
timeout/mail_check doesn't always work?
I have the following lines in my .muttrc file: set mail_check=5 # check for new mail every 5 seconds set timeout=10 # if no keypress in 10 seconds, check for new mail It doesn't seem to work correctly always, though. What's been happening is that I run screen and I leave multiple instances of mutt open in different folders. I'm inside the mutt that reads ~/Maildir/. I save a message into the =done folder. 10 minutes later, I switch to the mutt in the =done folder but it doesn't show the message that I just saved until I press a key. Any idea why?
[e]dit command causes new mail?
When I use the [e]dit command in mutt to edit a message in my folder (e.g. to add my own annotations to it), it deletes the old message and delivers the message I just edited as a new message into my mailbox. Wouldn't it make more sense for mutt to just apply the edit to the message without having to re-create it, at least when the folder in question is a Maildir? I think that for running the [e]dit command on a message in a Maildir, mutt should just start vi with the message file as the argument and it doesn't need to do anything else.
Re: Wish about mutt's file browser
On Tue, Feb 05, 2002 at 12:46:17AM +0800, Charles Jie wrote: 2. The 'ls' don't group directories/files into two part. - If you code something to achieve it, you lose the COLORs. Try typing this and see if it does what you want: ls -d `find * -type d -maxdepth 0`; ls `find * -type f -maxdepth 0` You could put this in your .bashrc (or equivalent file): alias dir=ls -d `find * -type d -maxdepth 0`; ls `find * -type f -maxdepth 0` and then just type dir and you will see the directories, followed by the files, and it's sorted and has color. Warning: It might not work right for directories that have a huge number of files due to limits in argument list length.
People who don't wrap their lines
I'm having trouble reading messages from people who don't wrap their lines. They have it so that one paragraph is a very long line, but it seems to cut off after about 255 characters, i.e. I can only see the first 255 characters of each line in the pager. I can't reproduce this always, though. If I send a message to myself that has a very long line, it comes through fine. I think it might require certain MIME conditions. Any idea what I'm talking about? I can forward a specific message that should cause these conditions.
New mail notification ideas
One thing that I've always missed since I switched from pine to mutt was pine's more verbose e-mail notification. Instead of just saying New mail in this mailbox. it would say something like: [New mail from Philip Mak re New mail notification ideas] Also, pine checks for new mail when it is in the pager. In mutt's case, it doesn't, so if I stay inside the pager for hours then I won't see any new messages. I would like to suggest that these features (verbose new e-mail notification line, and check for new mail while in the pager) be implemented in mutt.
Re: ^From line?
On Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 09:05:37AM -0800, Carl B. Constantine wrote: Wrong. It's actually part of one of the internet RFC's. MUTT is not the only client that does this. All E-mail programs place a quoted symbol '' for most people by the word From if it's the first word in a paragraph. Going a bit off topic: Unfortunately, the '' seems to be placed inconsistently. For example, if I send a message with the following line using pine: From asdf then the copy of the message saved in the sent-mail mbox does NOT have a '' before the From. But the exim MTA on the other end that receives the message will write it to the recipient's mbox as From asdf. Because of this inconsistency, I think it's impossible to determine for certain whether the message was sent with '' in the first place (which could happen if someone quoted a message without putting a space after the '', for example). It seems to work in most cases to s/^From/From/g, though.
stupid PGP question
I couldn't find the answer in the manual, so I'm asking it here: How do I make mutt not bother checking PGP signatures on messages (since I don't have anyone's PGP keys anyway)?
How is maildir_trash supposed to work?
I'm a bit confused about how to use maildir_trash. If maildir_trash is off, then when I quit mutt, if I answer no to purging the messages, then it will lose all the Deleted flags. If maildir_trash is on, then that works. However, then it doesn't seem to be possible to purge deleted messages anymore; I press $ and it asks Purge 1 deleted message? ([yes]/no): and I answer yes, but the message still remains in my mailbox. Is it not possible to be able to do BOTH of these: - save Deleted flags in messages - really purge a message pine can do it, out of the box.
Aborting a message
When I press 'q' to abort a message being composed, is there a way to make it ask: Abort this message? (y/N) (answering y will exit the message composing screen and throw away the message; answering n will do nothing, i.e. don't postpone it, but don't throw it away either) instead of asking me whether to postpone it? That prompt confuses me sometimes; about twice, I've thought no I don't want to postpone the message; I want to send it; I just pressed q by accident so I answered no, which causes the message to be thrown away.
Any mailbox cleaner program?
Does anyone know of a program that I can set as a cron job to go through an mbox file, and delete all messages that are from a mailing list and are 21 days old?
Reply quoting an unwrapped message
When I reply to a message that was composed without line wrapping (i.e. each paragraph is one long line), how can I make mutt wrap it before inserting ? e.g. instead of: You know I have a question...is anyone else besides me and Erica looking at these vids? Just checking, because if no one on here wants review board duty then let me know and I won't throw them in your face anymore ;p I'd like to see: You know I have a question...is anyone else besides me and Erica looking at these vids? Just checking, because if no one on here wants review board duty then let me know and I won't throw them in your face anymore ;p
Re: Reply quoting an unwrapped message
On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 05:26:19PM -0800, Will Yardley wrote: I suppose I could code some sort of startup code in 'vi' to find and wrap long lines, but how would I make it only trigger when 'vi' is being started on composing a new reply (and not any other time, e.g. editing an existing message)? call vi with an option to do this (ie set editor=vim +'blah'... But that also affects when I press the [e]dit key to edit a message in my mailbox, for example. I'd want the option to ONLY take effect when vi is being called after I pressed [r]eply. the problem is, that if you have stuff like this: blah blah blah $ ls /foo/bar $ cd blah it will get reformatted like this: blah blah blah $ ls /foo/bar $ cd blah Well, I was thinking of making it only reformat lines that are too long. This will make the above case work. Although, if someone sends the output of a program to me and it's just long enough to exceed 80 characters when is added to it, then that would be wrapped undesirably. How does pine do it, anyway? pine wraps paragraphs in replies fine. They seem to have some heuristic or something that does the right thing almost all the time...
Re: SMTP Authorization
On Sat, Feb 23, 2002 at 12:27:15PM +0100, Martin Karlsson wrote: The 'USER: unknown' bit makes me think you should try just: set pop_user = jerryvb Otherwise the POP-server thinks you're trying to log in as [EMAIL PROTECTED]@pop3.ispwest.com. I don't think that's the problem. I tried telneting to pop3.ispwest.com 110 and entering that invalid username: $ telnet pop3.ispwest.com 110 Trying 216.52.245.18... Connected to pop3.ispwest.com. Escape character is '^]'. +OK VopMail POP3 Server 5.2.203.0 Ready [EMAIL PROTECTED] USER [EMAIL PROTECTED]@pop3.ispwest.com +OK [EMAIL PROTECTED]@pop3.ispwest.com is welcome here Doing that does not cause the USER: unknown or invalid command in this state error message. I'm guessing that 'mutt' is entering some extraneous commands before giving the USER command. Look at this: $ telnet pop3.ispwest.com 110 Trying 216.52.245.18... Connected to pop3.ispwest.com. Escape character is '^]'. +OK VopMail POP3 Server 5.2.203.0 Ready [EMAIL PROTECTED] USER jerryvb +OK jerryvb is welcome here USER jerryvb -ERR unknown or invalid command in this state [USER] That tells me that the unknown or invalid command in this state error message happens when mutt enters the USER command when the server is not expecting it.
Suggest addition to manual
In the Reference section of the manual, I recommend adding a warning at the place where it describes imap_pass and pop_pass: mutt's bug reporting program will send the user's .muttrc file to everyone on the development list, so imap_pass and pop_pass should really be put in a separate file sourced from .muttrc. The user should be aware of this.
Using scoring to delete old mailing list messages
I configured mutt to automatically delete messages from mailing lists that are older than 21 days, provided that the message is not flagged or addressed to me. Here's what I came up with, in case it's useful to anyone else: my_hdr From: Philip Mak [EMAIL PROTECTED] # alternate e-mail addresses set alternates=pmak@animeglobe\.com|pmak@animelyrics\.com|pmak@trapezoid\.interserver\.net set score # set scoring on score ~A 5000 # default score is 5000 set score_threshold_delete=0 # Delete messages with score = 0 score ~F +1000 # Increase score of flagged messages score ~p +1000 # Increase score of messages addressed directly to me # Decrease score of messages from mailing lists older than 21 days score ~e [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~r 21d -5000 score ~e [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~r 21d -5000 score ~e [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~r 21d -5000 score ~e [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~r 21d -5000 score ~C vim@vim\.org ~r 21d -5000 score ~C mysql@lists\.mysql\.com ~r 21d -5000 score ~C online-ads@o-a\.com ~r 21d -5000
Re: Is mutt really handicapped?
On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 09:01:09AM -0500, Ben Logan wrote: Yes, it doesn't have nice and point-and-clicky interface, but I don't like them, anyway. Like many of you on this list probably do, I get several hundred messages a day (up to 600). I almost hyperventilate at the thought of trying to navigate through them with a pointy-clicky interface. There are some things that point-and-click GUIs are good for, but they are usually (in my experience) far less efficient than an interface like mutt's. Therefore, I consider mutt's interface another plus. :) Yeah, it would be a pain to have to point and click around to [D]elete through several messages, for example! I do find the mouse to be useful in some cases though: If I want to go to a specific message on the screen, it would be easier to just click it with the mouse than figuring out how many times I have to hit the arrow keys to get there. Also, some GUI mail clients allow opening multiple windows to show more than one message at a time. That functionality is useful for when I want to compose a single reply to multiple messages, for example. (In mutt or pine, if I wanted to go look at another message while I'm already writing one, I'd have to postpone it, go look, and come back.)
Writing a memo to myself
Scenario: I want to write a memo to myself that appears in my inbox. What's the easiest/fastest way to do this? Right now I'm doing m, pmakENTER, subjectENTER and then typing it. A side effect of this is that the memo ends up in my sent-mail folder too. Oh, is it a bug that when I press y to send a message, it won't let me send the message if no recipients are specified (but there's an Fcc: specified)?
Re: New Messages Flag
On Mon, May 13, 2002 at 09:59:40AM -0500, David T-G wrote: % I'm trying to get a new message flag to display in front of my % folder name in the folder index view. So I'm doing the following: % %set folder_format=%2C %N %8s %d %f % I'm seeing: % %10 66442 May 13 08:48 apache_users Hmmm... That says to me that your access-time timestamp has been updated by something looking at the folder, be it biff or wnewmail or your shell or even mutt. How about trying a simple test to isolate where the problem is (i.e. is it a set folder_format problem, or is some other process messing with the timestamp): What happens if you remove the set folder_format from your .muttrc and then restart mutt? Will that make the N flag show up correctly?
text/plain is unsupported?
I just got this e-mail message, and when I looked at it in the pager, all I saw was this: Date: Tue, 4 Jun 2002 02:40:08 From: Ryan Edwards [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Classic Cars or parts for sale [-- text/plain, is unsupported (use 'v' to view this part) --] Is this a bug in mutt, or was that message just badly formed MIME? ---BeginMessage--- Hi, I was just wondering if you had any Classic Cars or parts for sale. Please let me know either way. Thanks, Ryan Edwards ---End Message---
[a]lias command
I don't like the user interface for the [a]lias command. When I add an alias, it prompts me through a series of one-line prompts in the status bar. If I make a mistake, I have to press Ctrl+G and start the whole series of prompts over. And, it asks me at the end where I want to save the alias (I'd rather it not ask me, and always save to .mail_aliases). Furthermore, I run multiple copies of mutt in screen, and if I add an alias in one mutt, it doesn't show up in the other mutts unless I re-source .mail_aliases. Pine has a nicer interface. When I press a in Pine, it opens a full screen where I can fill out a form (and move between the fields I'm filling out), and then when I save it it doesn't ask me what file to save it to; it just saves it to the default aliases file. Anyway: 1. At least, can I configure mutt to not ask what file to save the alias to? 2. I'm thinking that some disk-based database (e.g. GDBM) would be more appropriate for aliases, rather than a text file that is sourced when mutt starts. This would fix the problem of aliases in one mutt not showing up in other mutts. (Also, if someone has a lot of aliases GDBM would be more efficient. I don't think anyone would have hundreds of aliases, though...) Thoughts?
[OT] Re: spamassassin
An off-topic query concerning spamassassin: Can it be set to delete spam automatically (I'm not so interested in just *marking* spam, because if it only marks spam I still have to sift through it), without getting too many false positives? I'm thinking of doing something about the 20+ spam messages I get each day.
