Re: [Nmh-workers] Should I learn nmh or GNU mailutils?
otah...@gmx.ca wrote: > Thanks for the clarifications. > What about ease of use, especially from a newbie perspective? > > Also, which scripting language would you suggest? Is there already a > repository for nhm scripts? There's a good number of example scripts in Jerry Peek's MH book† though that book dates from the 90s. There's no repository of nmh scripts, perhaps there should be... or something like a wiki. Scripting is most relevant if you use the command-line rather than a GUI front-end. Of the scripts I've collected written by others, plain Bourne shell seems to be popular. Most of what I have is zsh and I would very much recommend it. I've recently written scripts to create a temporary folder (using hard links) based on notmuch search results. notmuch supports MH folders, is very fast for searching and can identify threads but it's nothing like as nice to use as nmh for most other mail operations. Oliver † http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/ ___ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
Re: [Nmh-workers] Should I learn nmh or GNU mailutils?
Thus spake Oliver Kiddle: > > I've recently written scripts to create a temporary folder (using hard > links) based on notmuch search results. notmuch supports MH folders, > is very fast for searching and can identify threads but it's nothing > like as nice to use as nmh for most other mail operations. Another search recommendation: I've been using mairix for searching fo years now. It uses symlinks to create a folder of search results (instead of hard links) and has no problem instantly returning hits for the 473k messages I have. -- J. ___ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
Re: [Nmh-workers] Front-end census
exmh was the gateway drug that got me into (n)mh usage in the 1990s. Once I realized that I wanted to compose in emacs, I switched slowly to MH-E. (That transition was 15 years ago). I also helped that my first laptop had too little ram to run X-widnows, but could run emacs in console mode (or via ssh) just fine. I run emacs (remotely) from my desktop at home most of the time via ssh+emacsclient-nw. I can even run it (emacs+MHE) on my tablet (yes, it has a keyboard) with a debian chroot installed 20 hour of battery life, it is nice. I love that I can go back and start up exmh and see the same folders, etc. as I wish... On my todo list is to make one of the MH happy IMAP servers work so that if I have to see something in Thunderbird, I can do that. I generally move my older email from my desktop to a file server with more reliable disks. -- ] Never tell me the odds! | ipv6 mesh networks [ ] Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works| network architect [ ] m...@sandelman.ca http://www.sandelman.ca/| ruby on rails[ ___ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
Re: [Nmh-workers] Front-end census
>I really think you might want to consider mutt. It's not MH-specific (it >also supports maildir, mbox, IMAP and probably a few others), but it >certainly provides an excellent and highly customizable front-end for an MH >mail repository. A word of caution: mutt has the same problem that Claws Mail has, in that it does not lock the sequence file. Also ... a glance at the code suggests to me that it will wipe out any sequences that are not "unseen", "flagged", or "replied". Although it seems like what mutt does is write the sequences to a temporary file and then rename()s it to the sequence file, so I suspect there won't be any sequence corruption (but it's vulnerable to losing sequence information). Unfortunately, all of the front-ends (and IMAP servers) that claim to support MH mailboxes with their own implementation of the code only do it half-assed. People make it work, but you have to be aware of the limitations. --Ken ___ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
Re: [Nmh-workers] Front-end census
On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 10:08:46AM -0500, Ken Hornstein wrote: > >I really think you might want to consider mutt. It's not MH-specific (it > >also supports maildir, mbox, IMAP and probably a few others), but it > >certainly provides an excellent and highly customizable front-end for an MH > >mail repository. > > A word of caution: mutt has the same problem that Claws Mail has, in > that it does not lock the sequence file. I'm not sure how this would be an issue, unless you had multiple processes accessing the file at once, which is never the case for me. (I don't have any cron jobs fetching email. I simply fetch it when I want to read it.) > Also ... a glance at the > code suggests to me that it will wipe out any sequences that are not > "unseen", "flagged", or "replied". Although it seems like what mutt > does is write the sequences to a temporary file and then rename()s it to > the sequence file, so I suspect there won't be any sequence corruption > (but it's vulnerable to losing sequence information). I have not seen any issues with this, but again, this may be dependent on individual usage. -pd -- Peter Davis The Tech Curmudgeon www.techcurmudgeon.com ___ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
Re: [Nmh-workers] Front-end census
otah...@gmx.ca wrote:
> First of all, thanks to all of you guys on this mailing list. I am
> learning a lot.
> I hope you will excuse my many questions.
>
> I was happy to find out, from Ken's last email, that there is yet
> another front-end for nmh whose existence I did not know of: MH-V by
> Steve Rader. I have just downloaded it.
>
> This new discovery raises the question: how many front-ends are there?
>
> The ones I came across so far (though I have not ried them yet) are:
> 1) xmh (obsolete, I assume)
> 2) MH-E
> 3) exmh
> 4) MH-V
>
> Any other?
> Could you please give a brief assesment of each, based on your experience?
> Which one would be the best bet for a newbie?
> (I gather that most people nowadays use either MH-E or exmh.)
>
> Please share your views. Every bit of info will help, as I also have to
> decide whether to (partially) use Claws Mail or to go nmh/mailutils all
> the way, with the help of a front-end.
i think that at some point, you're just going to have to bite the
bullet and choose one to live with for a while. and if that one
doesn't work out, choose another. but i applaud your attempt at
short-circuiting the process!
my 2 cents: personally i have no real problem with dealing with
individual messages from the command line -- i have one- or two-letter
wrappers for the most common cases ('d' for deletion, 'p' for show,
'P' for "show -noshowproc", 'r' for reply, 'f' for forw, etc). some,
like 'p', do nothing extra. others, like 'd', do slightly more -- i
archive deleted mail from some folders, and prevent deletion entirely
from others. 'r' will adjust my From: header and .sig lines
depending on what folder i'm in.
but the biggest issue for me with "stock" mh is dealing with reading
or skimming large volumes of incoming mail from mailing lists, most of
which i'll delete right after viewing. the solution i use most often
is a script that takes the unseen sequence, sorts it into thread
order, then runs all the messages through "less" with enough blank
lines between them that i can't see two at once. with the search
string pre-loaded with "^Message", i can hit 'n' repeatedly to see the
headers and first page of text of each message. when finished, the
script re-marks all the messages as unseen. do after dealing with
whichever messages need replying or forwarding (usually none), i
simply "d unseen". oh -- my script also colorizes the Subject: and
From: headers, so they're easy to find quickly while scanning.
my other foray into wrapper-land is an extension of the above, called
"ml". it's nowhere nearly as sophisticated as the other front-ends
you're looking at, but i sometimes find it useful. (you'll find it in
the nmh docs/contrib directory.) it's useful when i'm less likely to
want to discard most of the messages after skimming -- it allows for
inline replying or forwarding, marking as spam, deletion, etc. of
course it uses native nmh to accomplish all this, so there are no
locking or corruption issues to deal with.
paul
--
paul fox, p...@foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 24.1 degrees)
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Re: [Nmh-workers] Front-end census
>I'm not sure how this would be an issue, unless you had multiple >processes accessing the file at once, which is never the case for >me. (I don't have any cron jobs fetching email. I simply fetch it when >I want to read it.) A number of people have fetchmail retrieving email, or procmail feeding messages into rcvstore ... it comes up. If you're using mutt to retrieve your email then it's not an issue. Again, my only point was that depending on the front-end program you cannot assume that every nmh command will interoperate with every front-end program. It depends on individual usage. >> Also ... a glance at the >> code suggests to me that it will wipe out any sequences that are not >> "unseen", "flagged", or "replied". Although it seems like what mutt >> does is write the sequences to a temporary file and then rename()s it to >> the sequence file, so I suspect there won't be any sequence corruption >> (but it's vulnerable to losing sequence information). > >I have not seen any issues with this, but again, this may be dependent >on individual usage. Do you not use custom sequences at all? If not, then it wouldn't be an issue. It also occurs to me (from looking at the code) that mutt does not interoperate with the standard nmh way of marking a replied-to message; nmh puts that as an annotation (and that's what scan looks for) but mutt stores that in a sequence. --Ken ___ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
Re: [Nmh-workers] Front-end census
Ken Hornstein wrote: > Unfortunately, all of the front-ends (and IMAP servers) that claim to > support MH mailboxes with their own implementation of the code only do > it half-assed. People make it work, but you have to be aware of the > limitations. For me, I want it just for access to archives. (read-only). I would be happy with some kind of ssh solution, but sshfs has proven too slow. -- ] Never tell me the odds! | ipv6 mesh networks [ ] Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works| network architect [ ] m...@sandelman.ca http://www.sandelman.ca/| ruby on rails[ ___ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
Re: [Nmh-workers] Front-end census
"o" == otahler o> The ones I came across so far (though I have not ried them o> yet) are: 1) xmh (obsolete, I assume) 2) MH-E 3) exmh 4) o> MH-V I started by using the command-line tools back in... 1990?* with Emacs as my editor.** Later I spent some years using exmh, until it seemed like development had completely stopped, at which point I looked at mh-e again and found that it would do everything I need. So I currently use mh-e (for something like 12 years) alongside the command-line programs, which are particularly handy when you just want to do a quick check on a message without worrying about replying. I've tried various other mail clients, including Novell GroupWise and Eudora during my painful Windows years, but I always end up coming back to MH/nmh. It does things by default that many mail clients don't. (A really simple example I've run into again and again: aliases -- done right with MH/nmh, not present at all or clunky on other clients.) Also, I've occasionally looked at GNU mailutils, as I mostly use mh-e and it works with them, but I've never been able to figure out some fundamentals about making it work, which has helped to keep me using nmh, where everything does just work. In general, I'd like to recommend MH/nmh to anyone, but I find that it's just totally inappropriate for most of my end users, who are used to and expect shiny, OS-native graphical mail clients, and don't need or don't want to deal with MH/nmh for the additional power. Claire * Holy crap! ** Thanks to Jerry Peek when he was at Syracuse University and got MH to be the main Unix mail client! *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Claire Connelly c...@math.hmc.edu System Administrator (909) 621-8754 Department of Mathematics Harvey Mudd College *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* For System News: http://www.math.hmc.edu/computing/news/ or http://twitter.com/hmcmathcomp/. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* pgpjeEPzUf5MO.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
Re: [Nmh-workers] Front-end census
On 2014-02-14 15:37, Michael Richardson wrote: I can even run it (emacs+MHE) on my tablet (yes, it has a keyboard) with a debian chroot installed 20 hour of battery life, it is nice. This is slightly off topic, I know, but what tablet has a 20 hr batter life? I have never heard of tablets with that long battery duration (apart from e-ink based ones, which are a different breed). ___ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
Re: [Nmh-workers] Front-end census
On 13 Feb 2014, at 19:11, Ken Hornstein wrote: >> 1) xmh (obsolete, I assume) > > I would be shocked if people still use xmh; wasn't it written with > Athena Widgets? Eww. Yeah, it was written in Xaw, but it was also written before Microsoft Windows came with network support included, so I think we should cut it some slack. :-) There were a couple attempts at Motif ports, but I believe that they (thankfully) never came to light. There was a while when write a better xmh was a rite of passage for new hackers at MIT (where MH was the default mail system and Emacs was the default editor). Ive seen (way back when) a few Xaw3D versions, so if you *really* wanted no, I dont think anyone will recommend xmh anymore. >> 2) MH-E > > There is a relatively active MH-E community; I'm a vi user myself, so I > never tried it. From what I can tell they've extended it to make up for > the deficiencies in MH; I can kind of understand that, since there was a > period in the 90s when MH development essentially stopped (a long and > tortuous period). MH-E is what kept me in MH for such a long time. If you can handle using Emacs (perhaps with Viper or Evil if you have vi pushed down into your fingers), its what I would recommend. Importantly, MH-E works very well in a mixed mail-client/command-line environment (at least, it did when I was pulled away ~a decade ago, and I doubt they would have lost it since then). Gnus was also entirely functional as a MH client, and I used it for a while, but unless youre going heavily into Gnus for other things, I dont think it adds nearly enough value over MH-E. >> 3) exmh This seems to be the best real MH gui client, if you want such a thing, but it seems to have stalled a long time back. It interoperates (I guess I should use the past tense, since I havent checked since the early 2000s) reasonably well with command-line mh use, but you might need the occasional rescan. A career change has made me deal with a lot more graphical mail clients and word documents than I would have tolerated when I used mh for everything, but the single biggest impediment for me these days is the added value of mobile clients - I use the macosx Mail app, not because its great, but because it integrates so well with my mobile phone and infrequent webmail access. The other big change is the drop in daily mail volume from multiple thousands of messages to less than a hundred. Id hate to imagine handling the same volume of mail with Mail.app that I lived in for years using mh+MH-E. One other wacky option Ill suggest if youre looking to really dig in is acme (acme.cat-v.org), a programmers editor written originally for Plan 9. It has its own (very non-Emacs) editing paradigm built in, but Ive heard of a few people (on this list, I believe) that have made solid nmh integration. Ive never used it (the mail integration), but maybe someone else can suggest a good starting place. I hope that helps! ~Chad ___ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
Re: [Nmh-workers] Should I learn nmh or GNU mailutils?
>There's a good number of example scripts in Jerry Peek's MH bookâ though >that book dates from the 90s. There's no repository of nmh scripts, >perhaps there should be... or something like a wiki. We have $(srcdir)/docs/contrib, and there are a few things in there now. So if you have stuff, feel free to put it in there (but don't forget to add it to Makefile.am if you want it to make it into the distribution tarball). --Ken ___ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
[Nmh-workers] why " at "?
this falls way down low in the pet peeve category: why is it that post, when showing me where my message is going to be delivered, says "someone at example.com" rather than "some...@example.com"? i'm guessing there's some ancient history surrounding that, but can't imagine what it might be. paul -- paul fox, p...@foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 25.5 degrees) ___ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
Re: [Nmh-workers] why " at "?
My guess is uucp, whichhad a ! delimited path, but there was still an intended recipient at a machine, but not @. ___ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
Re: [Nmh-workers] why " at "?
>this falls way down low in the pet peeve category: > >why is it that post, when showing me where my message is >going to be delivered, says "someone at example.com" rather >than "some...@example.com"? > >i'm guessing there's some ancient history surrounding that, but can't >imagine what it might be. That's the old RFC 733 address syntax, and yes, the nmh parser supports it, although I don't know how well it interoperates with some of the more modern stuff we've added since then. If I had to guess, that's just a holdover from those days. RFC 733 was published in 1977, and one of the authors was David Crocker, who worked at Rand at the time. (BTW, I've been meaning to try to get in a "What does the Fox Say?" joke with you on the nmh mailing list for a while now, but I couldn't quite pull it together). --Ken ___ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
Re: [Nmh-workers] Front-end census
Which one would be the best bet for a newbie? We don't know your work flow. We don't know what features are important to you. We don't know anything that could help us intelligently answer the question. I suggest you just install the various front ends, run each for a while, and decide four yourself which works best for *your* needs. --lyndon ___ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
Re: [Nmh-workers] Front-end census
I don't want to draw this out, but mutt is *so* much faster than any other front end that anyone who wants to get through a large volume of mail quickly really should check it out. It may be that there are some potential conflicts with other MH programs, as Ken says, but it's possibly to make rich use of both mutt and MH with no such conflicts. On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 10:47:25AM -0500, Ken Hornstein wrote: > A number of people have fetchmail retrieving email, or procmail feeding > messages into rcvstore ... it comes up. I use fetchmail, procmail and rcvstore with no problems. Again, I'm using these in strictly single-threaded fashion. I'm either fetching mail or reading it, never both at the same time. > Do you not use custom sequences at all? If not, then it wouldn't be > an issue. I do most of my mail stuff in mutt, but do pipe messages to Perl scripts which invoke MH commands for various things. I also use MH/nmh directly from the command line sometimes, but I don't create sequences that I expect to persist for any length of time. For example, if I'm reading mail from the command line, I have aliases for going forward or backwards through the messages in a folder. Another shortcut allows me to add junk messages to a "garbage" sequence, which I can then delete when I'm done. But I don't need to preserve this sequence across multiple sessions. -pd -- Peter Davis The Tech Curmudgeon www.techcurmudgeon.com ___ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
Re: [Nmh-workers] why " at "?
ken wrote: > >this falls way down low in the pet peeve category: > > > >why is it that post, when showing me where my message is > >going to be delivered, says "someone at example.com" rather > >than "some...@example.com"? > > > >i'm guessing there's some ancient history surrounding that, but can't > >imagine what it might be. > > That's the old RFC 733 address syntax, and yes, the nmh parser supports whoa. who knew? thanks. i had no idea it was actual syntax. > it, although I don't know how well it interoperates with some of the > more modern stuff we've added since then. If I had to guess, that's > just a holdover from those days. RFC 733 was published in 1977, and one > of the authors was David Crocker, who worked at Rand at the time. > > (BTW, I've been meaning to try to get in a "What does the Fox Say?" joke > with you on the nmh mailing list for a while now, but I couldn't quite > pull it together). Fraka-kaka-kaka-kaka-kow!!! of course. paul -- paul fox, p...@foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 24.3 degrees) ___ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
