(Hi, I just subscribed to mutt-users :)
I've been using mutt for a while as a nice elm replacement with good MIME
handling, and I just started looking at how to use it with mail filtered
into different folders for mailing lists and users by procmail.
So far, I have a procmailrc that dumps mail to various internal mailing lists
at my office into different folders in ~/Mail like this:
:0:
* ^TO_snapple-team@.*sfinteractive.com
snapple
That all works fine.
Then I have the lines:
mailboxes ! ~/Mail/snapple
lists snapple-team
fcc-save-hook '~C snapple-team' +snapple
in my .muttrc. They all work OK, but the interface for dealing with multiple
mailboxes in mutt doesn't seem that great. As I understand it, I will get
notification that I have new mail when it arrives in any of those mailboxes,
and in order to get to my next piece of new mail in any mailbox I have to
hit "c" to change mailboxes, hit Return, and hit Tab. If I want to pick
an arbitrary mailbox I need to hit "c", "?" to pick from a list.
What I want is a folder view, a bit like what you get with "c", "?", but with
the number of new and unread messages in each folder displayed. Pine does
some of this but doesn't show you the number of messages (and anyway, it's
Pine, yuck). I could then live in this view, keeping an eye on new mail
arriving in any of my mailboxes, then switch into a particular mailbox and
look at the message index for that folder. Does this exist and I'm just
missing where it is?
If mutt is tracking new messages in all my mailboxes,
it should be able to give me an overview of what mailboxes have new
messages and let me move around in them without the clunkiness of the
hit-"c"-and-repeat method, right? This might be an FAQ or a long-desired-
but-hard-to-implement feature, in which case I apologise, but I couldn't see
any mention of it.
I talked to some other people at my office (Pine users,
poor things) and they also expressed a desire for a view of their folders
which gave them an overview of information about each folder, rather than
having to live in the message index view and keep switching around between
folders to monitor their new mail. Eudora and other GUI mailers use
multiple panes to give access to other folders at all times, which we can't
do in the curser world, but it seems to me that it's a natural way of working
to move from list-of-folders to list-of-messages to actual-message (or
list-of-attachments, even), particularly if your mail is actually being
delivered into many different mailboxes with a procmail filter. tin works
something like this, moving from newsgroups (with numbers of new messages) to
a message-index for a particular newsgroup to an actual-message.
I think I could accomplish this with a wrapper that monitors all my mailboxes
for new mail and display that on a menu, pushing me into mutt on that mailbox
when I select one, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel (even though I
didn't see anything like this out there). The front end screen would look
something like:
Folder: New Unread Total
INBOX 12 4 348
+snapple 2 0 45
+adaptec 7 56 182
(I'm not exactly sure what information belongs there, it should probably
be configurable). Maybe I could even patch mutt to do this, although I
confess I haven't looked at the source code yet.
Failing all of that, it would be nice if I could hit Tab to move through all
new mail in all my mailboxes without having to use "c" to change mailboxes
by hand. Maybe there's a way of doing that too that I'm missing :)
I have a second problem with that setup and mutt in general, which is about
bulk-saving messages. I'm not sure yet whether I want to filter my mail
upfront into per-list mailboxes -- particularly if I can't get any way of
getting an overview of what has new mail -- but if I just dump all my mail
into my inbox and then want to save it out to per-list folders using
fcc-save-hook, there seems to be a weird interaction with message tagging.
I'll have a bunch of mail in my inbox that I want to save to the various
folders that it belongs in, but I want to go through and tag everything I want
to save and then save it all at once. Unfortunately, if I do this I only
get one choice of which mailbox to save it in, so either I save it all to my
big received mail file, or I save it all into the wrong per-list mailbox. Is
there a way of saving a bunch of mail out all into the right per-list mailbox,
using my save-hooks, and defaulting to my record mailbox for things I don't
have a hook for?
It occurs to me that just taking the confirm away from the save command
and using save instead of tag would accomplish some of this, although having
to actually save every message right away seems A) slow and B) error-prone
(I often tag something for saving and then untag it when I check my
tagged list, prior to doing save-tagged). Again, am I missing something or
is there no better way to do this?
Sorry that this first message is so long, and thanks in advance for any
light you can shed!
--
Jacob Davies
Lead UNIX Engineer
SF Interactive
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
