On Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 05:11:13PM -0500, Kyle Wheeler wrote: > On Monday, April 6 at 04:50 PM, quoth Zhengquan Zhang: > >> If that's your entire muttrc, it is meaningless. It would only have > >> any meaning if you use mbox-hooks elsewhere in your config. > > > > Thanks, so is there any rationale behind how to set spoolfile and mbox > > if we consider using getmail4 and procmail with mutt? There are so many > > different muttrc over the web and it is really confusing for a > > beginner... > > Think about mutt this way: mutt is, first and foremost, a mailbox > viewer. It will show you the contents of a mailbox. There are some > hooks in there (mostly for historical reasons) for handling spoolfiles > and such, but unless you run your own mail server, chances are that > stuff is irrelevant. Thanks for the insight, I used to think mutt is not only a mailbox viewer. > > If you tell mutt about mail that might be elsewhere (e.g. with a > $spoolfile setting), mutt will think you told it because you expect it > to DO something with that information. Don't put in information that > mutt doesn't need to know. So if you use getmail and procmail to > deliver your mail to a set of folders in your home directory, tell > mutt to look in those folders. You shouldn't even be using a > spoolfile, and mutt certainly doesn't need to be told to go looking > for one. here is a snippet of my getmailrc
[destination] type = MDA_external path = /usr/bin/procmail I use getmail to fetch mail from pop server and use procmail to process the mails. I 'guess' I don't have a spoolfile for getmail since my spoolfile in /var/mail is always empty. I also posted the question "whether I have a spoolfile in this situation" on getmail mailing list. > > The $spoolfile also specifies "what folder does mutt open when you > launch it". So, for example, I use something similar to this: > > set folder="imap://u...@mailserver/" > set spoolfile=+INBOX > set postponed=+Drafts > set record=+Sent > unset mbox > > Thus, when I launch mutt, it opens up my INBOX (i.e. $spoolfile). > > Does that help? Thank you very much Kyle, I appreciate your explanations. > > ~Kyle > -- > Life is too important to be taken seriously. > -- Oscar Wilde
