Re: My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues

[Richard Z]

On Sun, Jan 24, 2021 at 10:04:50PM -0600, boB Stepp wrote:

> 1)  Mutt erratically loses connection with Gmail and I have to
> manually reconnect.  Sometimes this happens rather frequently as in
> multiple instances within an hour.  I am confident it is not my
> Internet connection, which is normally quite stable and fast.  For
> instance my streaming music is never interrupted, the family's TV
> shows continue unimpeded, etc., but my connectivity to Gmail is
> interrupted randomly.  If I have both Mutt and the web interface open,
> Mutt has its interruptions while the Gmail web interface appears to be
> updating normally.

Had the same problem, tried lowering imap_keepalive which didn't fix it
but apparently the combination

set imap_keepalive=180
set timeout=180

fixed it for me. Have one remaining problem - if sending an mail using
builtin SMTP takes long the imap connection is lost anyway.
However I use external SMTP programs most of the times.

Richard

Re: Rendering HTML as Markdown in mutt (was: Creating HTML emails with mutt)

[Richard Z]

On Tue, Nov 05, 2019 at 09:31:27AM -0500, Mark H. Wood wrote:

> Anyway, a good place to read up on xterm might be
> https://invisible-island.net/xterm/
> That version of xterm still gets updates several times a year.  xterm
> is neither obsolete nor unsupported, just unloved by some distro.s.

absolutely. All replacements I have ever tried had some or many issues.
And while 25 years ago xterm was considered a true heavyweight among 
terminal emulators, the lack of "improvement" since that means it is 
probably the most lightweight choice today.

Richard

Re: Unable to set Reply-To

[Richard Z]

On Fri, Dec 15, 2017 at 12:39:13PM +, David Woodfall wrote:
> >Mutt 1.9.1 (2017-09-22)
> >
> >I have a folder-hook that sources a file. The file sets sendmail and
> >does this:
> >
> >my_hdr Reply-To: m...@mydomain.com
> >
> >But it refuses to work. I know the file /is/ being sourced because
> >sendmail changes.
> >
> >Any ideas?
> 
> More info:
> 
> I tried running mutt from CLI using -e for the my_hdr command. It did
> add the Reply-To header, but not with the email address that I gave
> it.
> 
> I've been googling this for hours now and nothing I try works.

there seems to be a config var "reply_to", maybe that overrides your 
my_hdr? Also, using the config var might be easier than my_hdr.


Richard

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Re: Refreshing ancient MIME/IMAP memories

[Richard Z]

On Wed, Nov 01, 2017 at 03:28:17AM -0700, fe...@crowfix.com wrote:
> My ISP has temporarily throttled me back to 128Kbps, and viewing email with 
> attachments has become slower.  It made me wonder if mutt could be configured 
> to only download the main email and leave the attachments behind, but that's 
> not how attachments work; they are just part of the body.  Then I had 
> flashbacks to when I inherited a sorry webmail program 20 years ago and had 
> IMAP so memorized that I could read email with a telnet session, and how much 
> I hated trying to remember what the next sequence number should be.
> 
> So I am asking if someone could kindly refresh my memory on exactly what IMAP 
> servers do to email they store.  Memory says they do not pre-process messages 
> to break out attachments; that it is not possible for mutt to only download 
> the basic text or html attachments, and leave all the jpg, gif, pdf, doc, and 
> other attachments alone until needed to save on the attachments page.  Year 
> of usage have also convinced me that if mutt could save downloading unwanted 
> attachments, it would, so it probably can't; messages are all or nothing.  Is 
> that correct?

IMAP can serve you all attachments separately and even chunks of bytes at any
position of the remotely stored email. No idea how to do it with mutt.

Richard

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Re: [SPAM?] Re: [SPAM?] Can I use Mutt from Bash to extract attachments into an arbitrary directory?

[Richard Z]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 10:53:02AM +1000, Cameron Simpson wrote:
> On 14Sep2016 16:12, Are Troi  wrote:
> >Last night at a technical talk I lamented the loss around 5 years ago
> >from Fedora of command-line tools to extract email attachments from a
> >BASH script and a colleague told me Mutt can do this.
> 
> If you mean the MIME tools mpack and munpak, I still use them. (On a Mac,
> where the Macports package is called mpack).
> 
> Wouldn't you be better off just fetching and buiulding them?

tried ripmime and munpak about a year ago to save all attachments from 
a large MBOX and it was everything but a hasslefree experience. Various 
attachments were missed or not processed, some segfaults.
Those tools are apparently not as robust as mutt is.

Ended up splitting the MBOX by formail 
  cat MBOX | formail -ds sh -c 'cat > msg.$FILENO'
and processing messages by 
  ripmime -v  --name-by-type --verbose-contenttype --verbose-defects  -i "$f"
.. and hoping not much was missed by this apporach.

Richard

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Re: options for mutt + notmuch integration

[Richard Z]

On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 05:55:02PM -0400, Xu Wang wrote:
 Dear all,
 
 I am studying the best approach to get better searching from within
 mutt. From what I understand, this involves looking for an indexer,
 and the best indexer is notmuch. If I misunderstood either of the
 previous points, please let me know. Note that my setup is mutt,
 offlineimap, and gmail.
 
 Assuming notmuch is the way to go, I have looked into options for
 integrating mutt and notmuch.
 
 I see the following possibilities:
 (1) mutt-kz
 (2) the python script.
 (3) mutt-notmuch [1] (I understand this is deprecated, see [2])
 (4) notmuch-mutt, which is integrated into notmuch (see [3])
 
 Is there another possibility I should look into?

I use mairix for most things, and recoll in situations where mairix
doesn't find what I want. 

Richard

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Re: quickly switching to an alternate for from

[Richard Z]

On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 09:58:06PM -0700, Mun wrote:
 Hi Ian,
 
 On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 06:15 PM PDT, Ian Zimmerman wrote:

 IZ Did you have a good reason to bypass Google servers?  If not, using
 IZ gmail as a relay would likely work around this.
 
 Not really.  I have multiple e-mail accounts that I process from a
 single system and so I tried to spoof the from: accordingly.
 
does not work, the worst very often you don't even get an error message
but your email lands in spam or gets deleted without trace.

 IZ Exim can be configured to conditionally relay some messages depending on
 IZ foo.  Other MTAs probably can, too.
 
 I'm using postfix; I'll have to look into that capability.

it works with postfix but I found it so complicated and brittle that 
I switched to esmtp where it is very easy. Many other like msmtp make 
it easy to use multiple accounts.

Richard

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Re: quickly switching to an alternate for from

[Richard Z]

On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 12:51:15PM +0100, spaceman wrote:
 Hi,
 
 reply-hook~t mailing-list.orgmy_hdr From: Richard
 em...@gmail.com
 
 Just to note that reply-hook doesn't appear to work here, however when I
 substitute it for send-hook it works as expected using my_hdr. I realize
 they are not the same thing but this result is what counts.

I had both send and reply-hooks on that, turns out I had an additional
  send-hook   .   'unmy_hdr From Reply-To Content-Type Cc'
in a different part of the file which apparently overruled my carefully
crafted settings.
With that fixed, it seems to work as expected :))



Richard

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Re: quickly switching to an alternate for from

[Richard Z]

On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 05:58:28AM +0200, MD wrote:
 Hi,
 
 I use this in my .muttrc, because I did not want to have it automatically
 depended on folders or accounts:
 
 macro compose I edit-from^Umarkustab Set identity / Select From:
 
 In my aliases file, I have these entries:
 
 alias markus1 Markus exam...@server.xy
 alias markus2 M. xy.exam...@provider.net
 alias markus3 MD goo...@server.xy

that works fine for me but did not get the automatic switching working yet.


Richard

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Re: quickly switching to an alternate for from

[Richard Z]

On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 04:17:15PM +0100, spaceman wrote:
 Hi,
 
 reply-hook~t mailing-list.orgmy_hdr From: Richard 
 em...@gmail.com
 
 Not being an expert in hooks (or mutt) but it looks like my_hdr is the wrong
 choice here. You probably need to do something like set from = spaceman
 space...@antispaceman.com
 to change whom you message comes from. 

hm.. I was trying to follow this instructions 
  http://dev.mutt.org/trac/wiki/UseCases/MultiAccounts
where my_hdr is used.
However for some reason the my_hdr is not used, signature
set in th same way is.

  I think setting the from alone
 won't work because you email provider might reject it (mutt will still send
 the message to the default provider).
 
 So I think you need your providers details (hostname, username, password and
 the like) in a configuration file and then source that in the reply-hook
 like in my send-hook. That's my best guess.
 
 I would provide an example but I use msmtp as an smtp client and mutt as the
 user agent.

I use esmtp and have this part working. Just need to figure out how to
set From: in a hook.


Richard

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Re: quickly switching to an alternate for from

[Richard Z]

On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 02:15:40PM +0100, spaceman wrote:
Hi,

 I use
 folder-hook ~/mail/space...@antispaceman.com/* source
 ~/.mutt/profiles/space...@antispaceman.com
 to change the from depending on which folder (or account in this case) I'm in.
 
 You do the same with account-hook I'm assuming (if you using imap). You
 could also define a macro to quickly change between profiles.
 
 You could also use send-hook for specific addresses that need to go from
 certain accounts:
 send-hook ~t space...@antispaceman.com source
 ~/.mutt/profiles/space...@antispaceman.com

I have an additional question regarding this: most of the time
mutt should reply by using the address which received the mail,
set reverse_name=yes seems to do this fine.

For a few mailing lists this does not work because the mail To:
has the mailing list address instead of my email address.
What is the best way to deal with this?

I tried 
reply-hook~t mailing-list.orgmy_hdr From: Richard em...@gmail.com

but it uses the default email instead silently ignoring the my_hdr.


Richard

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Re: msmtp freezed

[Richard Z]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 11:05:32AM +0100, debecio wrote:
 Hello, it is a little OT question. Since month when I send mail with msmtp 
 sometimes (not always) msmtp block on sending. I left for hours the process 
 work but nothing, none errors in log or in mutt but it stay blocked on 
 sending. If i kill process and send mail again it work. I seek a way to have 
 much verbose log but there is not options for this in .msmrprc file and if I 
 change in muttrc /usr/bin/msmtp with /usr/bin/msmtp -v (verbose) do 
 nothing.

use strace -p PID to see what it is doing. Also gdb,attach works.

Richard

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Re: mail box vanished

[Richard Z]

On Fri, Aug 01, 2014 at 07:51:03AM +0200, Ulrich Lauther wrote:
 On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 09:45:15PM -0400, Jon LaBadie wrote:
  
  Do you have a remote client getting mail from that
  mailbox which isn't configured to keep the mail on
  the server?
  
 no, I just retrieve mail from two providers using 
 
 /usr/bin/fetchmail -a -U -d 30 -L /var/log/fetchmail.log \
--auth password \
-m '/usr/bin/procmail  -d %T'

any kind of ill behaved tmp cleaner? Is the mbox accidentally softlinked
to non-persistent storage (tmpfs)?


Richard

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Re: mutt native SMPT support vs Postfix?

[Richard Z]

On Wed, Jan 08, 2014 at 02:59:37PM +, Grant Edwards wrote:
 On 2014-01-08, Richard Z r...@linux-m68k.org wrote:
  On Mon, Jan 06, 2014 at 04:48:18PM +, Grant Edwards wrote:

  not really. msmtp and esmtp have queueing.
 
 Can you provide references for that statement?
 
 From http://esmtp.sourceforge.net/features.html:
 
These are the esmtp features:
[...]
  * does not receive mail, expand aliases or manage a queue.

http://esmtp.sourceforge.net/
http://esmtp.sourceforge.net/manual.html

- search esmtp-wrapper. In Fedora this is readilly installed to act as 
a zero-config sendmail replacement.

msmtp has the msmtpq scripts in the scripts direcotry, not sure if any
distribution installs them by default so it may need a bit of work to
setup.

  Do all outbound messages get sent to a single relay host for routing? 
  If no, then you need a real MTA.
 
  more precisely if you need direct delivery as opposed to using one or
  several smarthosts.
 
 Direct delivery has become increasingly difficult in the past 10-15
 years due to anit-spam efforts.  It's gotten to the point where you
 need a static IP address, domain, and a fully configured DNS setup (MX
 records, reverse lookup matching the host name reported by your MTA to
 the SMTP server, etc.) Even then it often won't work if your static IP
 is considered residential rather than commercial or if you're
 unlucky enough to end up in the same block of IP addresses with some
 poor schmuck who got owned and used by spammers recently.

fully agree. I would personaly love to do direct delivery because it is
in my opinion the safest method but for most people this option is plain
total unrealistic.

  On the other hand, each of bultin mutt, mstmp and esmtp provide
  support for several smarthosts much easier than real MTAs.
 
 Good point.  I have several different .muttrc files (one for each of
 several identities), and they use use msmtp to send outbound mail
 via different relay hosts.  I never did figure out how to easily do
 that with qmail/postfix/exim.

I agree, had it working with exim and postfix but was not worth the 
effort.

  queueing scripts have been added that should work good enough for single
  users trying to send their mail
 
 I'm not sure what you mean by that.  Are you stating that mutt
 supports queing of outbound mail?  Are you talking about some
 intermediate layer that sits between mutt and msmtp/esmtp?

I was talking about esmtp and msmtp which support it as an addon.
Similar approach - a queueing script could be also written for mutt,
not a bad idea. I might come back to this because the locking in
both esmtp-wrapper and mstmpq look a bit less than rocksolid.

Possibly, since mutt supports postponed messages and everything else 
needed it would not be hard to implement outgoing messages queueing 
in mutt - but would require some thinking how to make it well 
configurable.


Richard

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Re: mutt native SMPT support vs Postfix?

[Richard Z]

On Mon, Jan 06, 2014 at 04:48:18PM +, Grant Edwards wrote:
 On 2014-01-04, Ulrich Lauther ulrich.laut...@t-online.de wrote:
 
  Recent posts made me aware of the fact, that mutt supports SMPT. So
  far I have been using postfix for mail transport. Which way is
  better, and why?
 
 [I'm assuming you're using postfix only for outbound mail.  If you're
 using Postfix to handle incoming mail, there's no way for mutt to do
 that.]
 
 Do you need/want outbound messages to be queued if they can't be sent
 immediately?   If yes, then you need a real MTA like postfix.

not really. msmtp and esmtp have queueing.

 Do all outbound messages get sent to a single relay host for routing? 
 If no, then you need a real MTA.

more precisely if you need direct delivery as opposed to using one or 
several smarthosts.

On the other hand, each of bultin mutt, mstmp and esmtp provide support for 
several smarthosts much easier than real MTAs.

 There is also the intermediate step of using something like msmtp
 which is a minimalist outbound-only MTA that provides the same
 /bin/sendmail command-line API as postfix, qmail, sendmail etc. It
 doesn't do queueing and it doesn't incoming mail: it's an SMTP client
 only, where postfix is both an SMTP client (outbound mail) and an SMTP
 server (incoming mail).

queueing scripts have been added that should work good enough for single
users trying to send their mail

http://dev.mutt.org/trac/wiki/SendmailAgents

http://esmtp.sourceforge.net/


Richard

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Re: mutt native SMPT support vs Postfix?

[Richard Z]

On Sun, Jan 05, 2014 at 08:48:50AM +1100, Cameron Simpson wrote:
 On 04Jan2014 20:01, Matthias Apitz g...@unixarea.de wrote:
  El día Sunday, January 05, 2014 a las 02:50:12AM +0800, Chris Down escribió:
   On 2014-01-04 19:35:19 +0100, Ulrich Lauther wrote:
Recent posts made me aware of the fact, that mutt supports SMPT.
So far I have been using postfix for mail transport.
Which way is better, and why?
   
   Better is subjective. Using Postfix for this is pretty heavy duty over
   using a purpose-built MTA.
  
  I'm using mutt (right now by typing) on my FreeBSD netbook, connected
  via UMTS WAN to my ISP. My mutt drops the mail (this mail) to the local
  MTA (sendmail) and this takes care for the transport to the next MX hop,
  even if the WAN link is down; the mail gets queued until the link comes
  up again. I think this, queuing, is a big advantage over talking SMTP
  directly by mutt.
 
 I agree. I'm running postfix on my Mac (it ships with postfix installed).
 Local queuing. Automatic retry accordidng to a sensible policy.
 
 AND:... All the local systems that send email (eg cron and innumerable
 shell scripts) can send email via the UNIX standard sendmail
 executable.
 
 Use a real mail system locally. A win.

unless you try to do something like multiple email providers for one user 
which is very easy to do with anything but sendmail/postfix/exim. I have done
this on all three and got tired, after every system upgrade some incompatible
change breaks it and even the most basic smarthost configuration stops working, 
not to mention the multiple accounts which always required some configuration
acrobatics.

Also, having mail comming from mutt going through postfix to a smarthost
generates headers which increase the spam score of your email dramatically
because the headers are very similar (or practically indisinguishable) to 
headers that would appear from an open relay.

If mail queueing is a requirement esmtp has it. Although it needs fixing
to work reliably it is still much easier than configuring one of the
big programs.

I would not touch sendmail/postfix/exim again unless I want to run
a real public mail server.

Richard

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Re: mutt native SMPT support vs Postfix?

[Richard Z]

On Sun, Jan 05, 2014 at 09:16:02AM -0500, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
 * Richard Z r...@linux-m68k.org [01-05-14 08:57]:
  [...]
  unless you try to do something like multiple email providers for one
  user which is very easy to do with anything but sendmail/postfix/exim. 
  I have done this on all three and got tired, after every system upgrade
  some incompatible change breaks it and even the most basic smarthost
  configuration stops working, not to mention the multiple accounts which
  always required some configuration acrobatics.
 
 I have been doing this for *many* years with miniminal intervention across
 many versions of linux, mostly SuSE/openSUSE w/o problems using
 postfix/fetchmail/procmail/spamassassin.  Postfix and/or most other mta's
 also provide the use of rbl's to help minimize spam.

your or mine spam filter is not the problem. The problem is when you pipe email 
through a local postfix/exim MTA it will attach received headers with the 
domain 
name and IP, quite often a domain name and IPs that is not even valid. 
The mail than goes through the smarthost - and this combination easily looks 
suspicious to certain stupid spam filters of the destination provider.

Because the problem is not with your/mine system but the stupidity of the spam
filter on the other end it is not easy to fix.

It may be that I was hit a bit more often by stupid spam filters because I am 
using linux-m68k.org domain as from addr but routing mail through gmail.. I will
never know because such providers never answer questions, they just silently
discarded my mail.

 In November last I had to replace my server box witch intailed a four
 version upgrade/jump and all I really did to the mail system was clean up
 /etc/postfix/main.cf and /etc/postfix/access of stale and mostly commented
 out ancient text from prior *experiments*.
 
  [...]
  I would not touch sendmail/postfix/exim again unless I want to run a
  real public mail server.
 
 Somewhere you have encountered major weird problems or I have experienced
 the luck of a drunken Irishman (which I may be).

perhaps I was doing things at the wrong time, when I first messed with sendmail
something as simple as smarthost support was an unusual thing to do.

But the only easy solution that I can see to prevent the suspicious MTA 
headers 
problem is avoiding the local MTA hop.

Richard

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Re: How to match a whole word?

[Richard Z.]

would something like [^ ]tex[^ ] work?



Richard

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