On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 10:12:26PM -0400, A. Craig West wrote: > The recommended method replying is actually not strict bottom-posting. It is > EDITED bottom posting, where you only keep enough of the previous message to > keep the context obvious.
One of the nicer features of mutt is its ability to toggle the display of quoted material (or simply skip past it). By default these actions are bound to the "T" and "S" keys in the pager screen. I'm constantly annoyed by mail from people that apparently can't find the delete key on their keyboard and quote all fifteen pages of text in a post they are replying to, with their three lines of actual content buried somewhere within (invariably with no surrounding whitespace whatsoever -- they can't seem to find the return key either). In mutt I just have to bounce on the "T" key to find the three lines of (usually anti-climatic) text they actually composed. Mutt also has the best threading of any mail tool I've ever used. (For that matter, it's the all around best mail tool I've ever used.) Mail is all about processing text quickly. I really hate taking my hands off the keyboard when processing text (which is why I rarely use GUI mail clients -- and refuse to use any that don't let me use vim while composing). Sadly, the IMAP support in mutt is somewhat lacking. It'll ask for header info for all umpteen bazillion messages in a folder before it presents the summary of the last 20 or so messages actually required to display the folder summary. IMAP is the ONLY thing that pine does better than mutt, IMHO. Fortunately I now maintain my own mail server and explicitly switched to courier-imap because it (only) groks maildirs. I access the maildirs directly from mutt sessions rather than using IMAP. Mutt still scans all umpteen bazillion messages in the maildir, but with reiserfs this is still reasonably quick. (Reiserfs rocks with big directories full of small files.) Even with multiple open mutt sessions and IMAP client sessions (sylpheed-claws, squirrelmail, pine whatever) reading my mail simultaneously machines from all over the internet, things don't get confused. [As long as I'm somewhere with an ssh client, I just ssh over to my server and run mutt locally -- otherwise I'll just use a browser or whatever IMAP client might be handy at the remote site.] -- Rex -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
