Re: mutt 2.2.0 released
On 22/02/13 06:45AM, Ranjan Maitra wrote: Kevin, As a somewhat new user of mutt (for about a year), please accept my gratitude... This is my situation as well. I have recently come to Mutt and it is now my daily email client. It is a pleasure to use, and I am thankful that you have dedicated your precious time to this project! -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp "There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad code." -- Fion's Law
Re: Differences and interactions between subscribe, lists, group, alternates and alias.
On 21/02/16 12:28AM, Øyvind A. Holm wrote: On 2021-02-16 00:17:22, Øyvind A. Holm wrote: On 2021-02-15 16:01:06, boB Stepp wrote: > > On Monday, 15 February at 21:53, boB Stepp wrote: > > > And from reading the Mutt manual I have encountered the > > > alternates option, but now I am not sure what it is useful for > > > and how to most effectively use it. > > And "alternates" is still a mystery... It is used if you have any alternate or old email addresses. `alternates` makes it possible for Mutt to mark messages in the index with "F" (from one of your addresses), "+" or "T" (to one of your addresses), etc. For example, alternates job_em...@example.net alternates old_em...@example.com alternates another_...@example.org Now Mutt knows that all these addresses belong to you. A small correction (even though the above example will work). The parameter after `alternates` is a regexp, so a more correct way to write them would be alternates ^job_email@example\.net$ alternates ^old_email@example\.com$ alternates ^another_old@example\.org$ to avoid false positives with for example "yet_another_...@example.org". So is this mostly to provide labeling information in the index? I suppose it might be usable for some sort of filtering purposes... -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Re: Differences and interactions between subscribe, lists, group, alternates and alias.
On 21/02/15 10:33PM, Wim wrote: On Monday, 15 February at 21:53, boB Stepp wrote: ...BTW, typing "Mu" into the "To:" field and then hitting does *not* fill in the email address; instead, it brings up a browser view where I have to hit before the address is inserted. Is there a way, when there are no conflicting "Mu" entries, to just *immediately* have hitting insert the address? If you change your alias line to: alias Mu Mutt-Users typing Mu and will work, not . Ah! I was misunderstanding the function of in expanding things. I haven't done it yet, but what I would like to do is have different groups that I can type a shortcut and have all the email addresses inserted. For instance, I would like to have a group "Kids" which when typed would auto-expand into my kids' email addresses. Also, I would like to be able to type in abbreviations like "Jess" and have that expand to my daughter's email address. How would I go about doing this without having a browser view come up with numbered entries? I think what you want is this. Given the kids' email addresses: alias Joe Josephine Murphy alias Moe Moe Murphy you can alias them as: alias fam Joe Moe and typing fam and will auto-expand. Yep, this works. Thanks! So what is the purpose of "group"? How can it help me? And from reading the Mutt manual I have encountered the alternates option, but now I am not sure what it is useful for and how to most effectively use it. And "alternates" is still a mystery... -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Differences and interactions between subscribe, lists, group, alternates and alias.
The current ongoing thread about lists and subscribe have led to my email. I don't think I am understanding the differences and interactions to these different Mutt configuration possibilities. From the other thread if I am understanding correctly for those mailing lists that I am subscribed to and actively participating in in real life, it is to my benefit to set these up with setting subscribe for each such list. For these lists there is no point in my using the lists configuration option. If I a just following a list, then using lists configuration option is probably more appropriate. As to the group option I was under the impression that I could give a nice shortcut name and assign a list of email addresses to it and then use it as an alias. But that does not appear to be the case. For instance I had forgotten to explicitly subscribe to Mutt-Users, so today added to my muttrc: subscribe -group Mutt-Users mutt-users@mutt.org and had the expectation that since I used "-group", I could type "Mu" and hit in the "To:" field and get the Mutt-Users address inserted. I was sadly mistaken! I had to explicitly add alias Mutt-Users to my aliases file before that would occur. So I am not seeing how to use "group". Can someone explain please? BTW, typing "Mu" into the "To:" field and then hitting does *not* fill in the email address; instead, it brings up a browser view where I have to hit before the address is inserted. Is there a way, when there are no conflicting "Mu" entries, to just *immediately* have hitting insert the address? I haven't done it yet, but what I would like to do is have different groups that I can type a shortcut and have all the email addresses inserted. For instance, I would like to have a group "Kids" which when typed would auto-expand into my kids' email addresses. Also, I would like to be able to type in abbreviations like "Jess" and have that expand to my daughter's email address. How would I go about doing this without having a browser view come up with numbered entries? And from reading the Mutt manual I have encountered the alternates option, but now I am not sure what it is useful for and how to most effectively use it. I think that sums up most of my current head scratching. -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Re: My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues
On 21/02/14 10:25AM, Angel M Alganza wrote: On Sun, Feb 14, 2021 at 01:10:41AM -0600, boB Stepp wrote: On 21/02/13 08:03PM, Sam Kuper wrote: A queue script is included with msmtp, so you can have the best of both worlds :) https://git.marlam.de/gitweb/?p=msmtp.git;a=blob_plain;f=scripts/msmtpq/README.msmtpq;hb=HEAD Is there an obvious way forward to check periodically for regaining the network connection and flushing the queue? From the URL above: msmtp-queue -r -- runs (flushes) all the contents of the queue Try running 'msmtp-queue -r' at your shell. It should trigger sending. Adding 'msmtp-queue -r' as a cron job should do it automatically. I saw that, but wanted to be sure I wasn't missing any functionality built-in due to my lack of understanding or ignorance. If there is built-in functionality to do this, I am not finding it. I haven't found one, but I think it'd go through cron or some other scheduling system. So it sounds like I wasn't missing anything from what you and Sam are saying. I don't send out very many emails; I read far more than I respond to. My Internet connection is usually very reliable. I am wondering if it is even worth the effort for a cron job on this. I think what you suggest -- an manual 'msmtp-queue -r' as needed -- is more than ample for my use case. For that matter, in most instances I don't even mind waiting until I send another email which will achieve the same effect. Thank you very much for everyone's suggestions! My Mutt installation is getting better and better and faster and faster! -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Re: My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues
On 21/02/13 08:03PM, Sam Kuper wrote: On Fri, Feb 12, 2021 at 01:30:04PM +0100, Angel M Alganza wrote: I did the same myself for years and also switched to ssmtp. But I belive ssmtp was discontinued, and now I'm using msmtp: https://marlam.de/msmtp/ I couldn't be happier! A queue script is included with msmtp, so you can have the best of both worlds :) https://git.marlam.de/gitweb/?p=msmtp.git;a=blob_plain;f=scripts/msmtpq/README.msmtpq;hb=HEAD I went ahead tonight and compiled msmtp from source to get version 1.8.14. I was previously on 1.8.8. I did the steps suggested in the link you provided. Everything worked well. Then I thought I would test this queuing functionality. I disconnected from my network and sent a test email. It promptly popped up in the queue directory. So far so good. I reconnected to my network and waited expectantly for the queued mails to be sent. They just sat there. I looked through the source of the msmtpq script and AFAICT queued emails will *not* be sent until the next attempt to send a mail. So I tested this and sure enough the queue flushed itself and my earlier queued email was sent. As I do not consider myself competent in shell scripting, am I reading the source correctly? Is there an obvious way forward to check periodically for regaining the network connection and flushing the queue? If there is built-in functionality to do this, I am not finding it. TIA! -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Re: My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues
On 21/02/14 10:52AM, Cameron Simpson wrote: On 12Feb2021 23:20, boB Stepp wrote: something I like working with notmuch. I wish I could use notmuch's tagging capabilities from within Mutt in the sense of adding multiple tags to a single email or a set of tagged emails. But the only example of an approach is to try to adapt the macro I cited earlier in this thread which deletes the inbox tag. I see how to modify this to do *one* tag, but that would be hard-coded and not very flexible or useful. I'm sure there must be a way to write a macro to allow for me to enter multiple tags for notmuch, but I don't know enough about Mutt macros to see a way forwards yet. "notmuch tag" itself accepts multiple tags. Write a small shell script to prompt for the tags to change (in the same form as notmuch expects i.e. +tag and -tag) which then invokes notmuch. If you mean this macro: macro index \ "set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key\ notmuch-mutt tag -- -inbox\ set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key" \ "notmuch: remove message from inbox" it: - saves the pipe_decode and wait_key settings, and turns them off - pipes the current message through notmuch-mutt to remove the "inbox" tag - restores the old pipe_decode and wait_key settings The $my_blah= is a standard mutt hack because there's no "push temporary setting or value", and there are no settings called my_*. So people use $my_blah for "user variables". Piping the whole message through notmuch lets notmuch-mutt get the message-id in order to know which item to tag or untag. The it passes "id:$mid" to notmuch, where $mid is the message id. That's the mechanism. This is all starting to make sense. With the suggestions below I think I might be able to attack this. Many thanks, Cameron! To tag things interactively you have 2 issues: - specifying the messages to tag - specifying the tag changes For the latter I'd have a shell script which prompted for that, then ran notmuch. For the former, from inside mutt, I'd think there are 2 ways forward. With a single message you can just pipe it straight into the script, like the above macro does. With multiple messages I think I would tag them, and pipe all of them _separately_ through the script. Now, there are some ways to make that more convenient, particularly these settings: set auto_tag=yes set pipe_split=yes auto_tag=yes causes mutt to apply commands to all tagged messages (if any) or just the current message (if nothing tagged). pipe_split=yes causes mutt to run separate pipes per message when it pipes multiple messages, instead of concatenating them and running one pipe. You want that for notmuch-mutt. The notmuch-mutt script in the example above expects exactly one message on its input, _entirely_ to grab its message-id. So we want pipe_split-yes to invoke the script once for each message. Regarding prompting, I'd write a script like this (untested): #!/bin/sh set -ue echo -n "Enter tags to change (-tag, +tag): " >/dev/tty read tags -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Re: My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues
On 21/02/13 08:03PM, Sam Kuper wrote: A queue script is included with msmtp, so you can have the best of both worlds :) https://git.marlam.de/gitweb/?p=msmtp.git;a=blob_plain;f=scripts/msmtpq/README.msmtpq;hb=HEAD Thanks for this link! -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Re: My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues
On 21/02/13 08:01AM, Cameron Simpson wrote: On 01Feb2021 03:32, ಚಿರಾಗ್ ನಟರಾಜ್ wrote: 12021/00/30 09:27.95 ನಲ್ಲಿ, boB Stepp ಬರೆದರು: 2) I would like to remove all email storage from the cloud, that is, whether Gmail or ProtonMail, once I have my mail on my local PC I want to delete it from those accounts. What would be the best way to do this? If you use a separate mail syncing program like fetchmail or mbsync or whatever, you can tell it to delete emails on the server after (successfully!) fetching them. Personally, I don't know that I would recommend that, simply because you never know when you might actually need access to your emails from e.g. your phone. I use a comprimise here. I pull everything from my c...@cskk.id.au inbox, deleting it. But my mail filing forwards a suite of messages to a separate account which is for my phone. So anything important sends a copy back out to the cloud. Well, a personal external server. Um, in the cloud :-( Likewise, any email I reply to sends the source message and the reply to that account. In this way my phone has access to a copy of the critical stuff and also any ongoing email discussions. So it seems you only concern yourself in keeping relatively current emails accessible to your phone? You haven't had occasion to need something from a while back to fetch on your phone that suddenly becomes needed? -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Re: My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues
On 21/02/13 07:56AM, Cameron Simpson wrote: On 31Jan2021 21:16, boB Stepp wrote: 1) I eventually want to migrate all of my Gmail to ProtonMail. I will probably never entirely get rid of Gmail. For one thing it makes a good honey pot for when I must supply an email, but do not want to give out my preferred email. Might I suggest mailinator.com for this? It's a free service which accepts email for _any_ address @mailinator.com (and a suite of other domains for when systems special case reject mailinator). Messages are kept for a short preriod of time and only the text component. You can look at them with a web browser interface. There are no passwords (so pick a random address to avoid collisions). It is handy for temporary-but-necessary addresses, or for "boring" addresses (vendor spam). Hmm. This is a good idea. I have heard of such services, but never have looked them up to see what they can do or if they cost anything. But I would like to at least minimize the data they collect on me. I forward all email from the GMail account which is "To:" the GMail address, to my real address c...@cskk.id.au. I do leave it behind (so archived, not deleted) at the GMail end. I see two routes towards this migration: (a) Forwarding all Gmail to ProtonMail and only have Mutt track ProtonMail. As I get time I will notify everyone to use my new email address. I do that (GMail -> c...@cskk.id.au). If nothing else, there will always be services with you GMail address (or whatever old address). I haven't yet reached my final decision on what I am going to do. I have been using the Gmail address for quite a long time, so I would hate to miss an email from someone I care about that sends me one years out of the blue. Currently I have been setting up mbsync, msmtp and Mutt for multiple accounts. If nothing else it is teaching me a lot. Currently I am puzzling over the "bridge" needed for ProtonMail to ensure I understand it well enough to configure everything properly. Hopefully I will be done with this sometime this weekend. I also want to try out Mutt's sidebar feature to see what I think of it and using two email accounts seems like it would give it a good testing. I can always drop down to one account and forward Gmail to ProtonMail. 2) I would like to remove all email storage from the cloud, that is, whether Gmail or ProtonMail, once I have my mail on my local PC I want to delete it from those accounts. What would be the best way to do this? I collect from my c...@cskk.id.au account using getmail with a setting which deletes collected messages. So the actual c...@cskk.id.au inbox is normally empty. Another one I am still pondering. What do I want to keep where? 3) I would like my local storage of my emails to allow for me to store certain content types in sensible folders. For example, Python Tutor emails that I want to keep I would like to store in a Python Tutor folder, Mutt emails in a Mutt folder, etc. Pretty sure I'm mentioned this before. My process is getmail from c...@cskk.id.au, and a separate programme to file messages. I have my own (mailfiler), but procmail and other tools are popular. Yeah, I think you have. I have kept those earlier emails from you nicely flagged in my inbox for reference. Currently I am trying to see if I can get something I like working with notmuch. I wish I could use notmuch's tagging capabilities from within Mutt in the sense of adding multiple tags to a single email or a set of tagged emails. But the only example of an approach is to try to adapt the macro I cited earlier in this thread which deletes the inbox tag. I see how to modify this to do *one* tag, but that would be hard-coded and not very flexible or useful. I'm sure there must be a way to write a macro to allow for me to enter multiple tags for notmuch, but I don't know enough about Mutt macros to see a way forwards yet. The other option is to install one of these notmuch user interfaces and do my tagging outside of Mutt. But that seems a bit of an awkward setup. Probably I would best be served by a manual, not an automatic, moving into desired folders as I will be picky as to those emails I would like to keep. What would be the best advice on this? Then tag messages in you inbox and ";s+folder" to move them in batches. Here I mean mutt's (t)ag keystroke, an in memory flag. Emphemeral, used entirely to do mutt things to an ad hoc batch of messages. Yeah, I just was playing around with this some earlier in the week. I'm now doing this to tag and move emails into my Archive folder, which I have bound "S" for this purpose. Which leads me to a question I have been meaning to ask. This is what I am using right now: macro index,pager S "=Archive" "Send to Archive" If I don't add then the email(s) sit there marked deleted (Funny that the same 'D' label is used here as for a real deletion.)
Re: My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues
On 21/02/13 08:11AM, Cameron Simpson wrote: On 08Feb2021 14:43, boB Stepp wrote: So I changed the command to: mbsync -a -qq and everything has been working. I was curious as to what would happen at 3 AM when my router would reboot. I got: Feb 8 03:00:01 Dream-Machine1 CRON[614314]: (bob) CMD (mbsync -a -qq ) Feb 8 03:00:24 Dream-Machine1 CRON[614312]: (CRON) info (No MTA installed, discarding output) Hmm. The same "No MTA installed, discarding output" as with the originally worded command. More information, but I still do not see why this message is generated. I would guess your PC does not have a mail system installed. So cron cannot deliver the cron job output by email. I was aware that a cron job could email its output, but I thought I would have to explicitly set that up. Is this not the case? In any event I do not know enough at this time to do this, so I haven't done so. But if your hypothesis is correct and it is trying to email me, but finding no MTA to enable it to do so, why don't I *always* get this message? One of the benefits of have a local email system is getting stuff from cron et al. Also, you can use it for spooling - if mutt sends via the local email system you can send when offline - it will just queue. One concern based on earlier discussion in this thread. I am now using msmtp as my MTA client. What will happen if I send an email when, for whatever reason, Gmail connectivity is broken? Will it get resent? I don't know. What does its manual say? You don't know how much documentation and search results I have been reading the past few days! My head is spinning chock full of half-understood information about multiple email software and topics!! As far as I have been able to tell from the man pages msmtp will attempt to send me a notification email in the event of delivery failure. AFAICT, there is no explicit mention of msmtp trying to resend the email. Also it is not clear to me if delivery failure includes not being able to connect to the Internet. It did say it uses standard exit codes, but I did not see how it would act in this instance. I am doing some online searching, but the answer I desire isn't coming up with my current search terms. But I will persist. I always seem to do... -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Re: Location of sample muttrc and mailcap files, and correct names of Gmail folders
On 21/02/12 06:50PM, David J. J. Ring, Jr. wrote: Also and this seems to be the initial cause of my calamity, what is the correct names of the imap folders in gmail? Some of my muttrc files have GMail others have Gmail with only the first letter capitalized. I just got through doing a major overhaul of my Gmail. Gmail's system labels are as follows: [Gmail] [Gmail]/All Mail [Gmail]/Drafts [Gmail]/Sent Mail [Gmail]/Spam [Gmail]/Starred [Gmail]/Trash And of course +INBOX refers to [Gmail]/Inbox. There are other reserved labels in Gmail such as Snoozed, Important, Chats, etc., but if those are of interest you can "Google" for them. ~(:>)) The one gotcha from my perspective is that Gmail uses "labels" *not* "folders" to structure its mail. So any particular email may have multiple labels. If your intention is to map labels to folders this may cause you grief if you are not careful. HTH! -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Re: My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues
On 21/02/12 01:40PM, Angel M Alganza wrote: On Mon, Feb 08, 2021 at 02:43:48PM -0600, boB Stepp wrote: killall mbsync &>/dev/null; /usr/bin/mbsync -a -qq Maybe it's an stupid idea, but perhaps mbsync is starting to run so fast that the killall kills it? You could try replacing the semicolon wich a couple of ampersand signs to make sure that mbsync is started only after killall has exited? killall mbsync &>/dev/null && /usr/bin/mbsync -a -qq Hmm. Worth a try. Thanks! -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Re: My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues
On 21/02/11 06:51AM, David J. Weller-Fahy wrote: I recently revamped my mbsync crontab jobs, and now have three separate jobs (fast, medium, and slow). I used an article about converting from offlineimap to mbsync [1] as inspiration. [1]: https://people.kernel.org/mcgrof/replacing-offlineimap-with-mbsync Actually this article is quite helpful. Thanks! -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Re: How to use/integrate "notmuch" with Mutt
On 21/02/09 12:23PM, Cameron Simpson wrote: On 08Feb2021 17:17, boB Stepp wrote: My online research into "notmuch" does not seem to be giving my expected results. My _expectations_ going into this were that with "notmuch" I could: 1) Open an email in Mutt. 2) Based on that email and its contents assign relevant tags to the email via notmuch. These tags would prove useful in the future when searching for tagged content. 3) From within Mutt I could initiate a notmuch search across _all_ of my mail directories. After notmuch returns the search results I could open any of these emails from within Mutt. 4) Et cetera. Meaning similar types of actions initiated from *within* Mutt. That seems to be key. Hmm. I've installed notmuch and notmuch-mutt, both version 0.29.3 dated 2019-11-27 from my package manager. I was concerned that they wouldn't properly work with my more current Mutt 2.0.5, but so far I have not detected any issues. I used the macros suggested on the ArchLinux wiki I mentioned in my earlier response to Cameron. F8 allows me to search all mailboxes from within Mutt. The results show up inside a (I guess) temporary mailbox. I can open these and do usual Mutt-like stuff. F9 supposedly reconstructs threads from emails scattered over multiple mailboxes. I haven't tested this one yet. F6 did not do what I thought it would do from the description. Apparently all it does is remove the inbox tag from all emails is the current search results. In the man pages for notmuch-mutt it suggests that the portion of the macro "-inbox" can be replaced with a different tag. I don't have a good understanding of this macro. I will paste it in below: macro index \ "set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key\ notmuch-mutt tag -- -inbox\ set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key" \ "notmuch: remove message from inbox" I have a question: Can this be modified so that the user is prompted to enter a tag name which can then be applied to all of the search results? If yes, then that would be wonderful for what I have in mind. Even better would be the ability to enter multiple tags after pressing F6. To finish up I have modified my crontab entry to run "notmuch new --quiet" after it runs the "mbsync -a -qq" command at five minute intervals. So far things seem to be running well. A perhaps better way of doing this scheduling would be the recommendations at the ArchLinux wiki at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Isync#Integration_with_notmuch_or_mu4e However, this would require me to do some research on systemd, configuring and starting services, etc. Perhaps I'll investigate this later, but perhaps someone more knowledgeable than me will find this link useful. -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Re: How to use/integrate "notmuch" with Mutt
On 21/02/09 12:23PM, Cameron Simpson wrote: On 08Feb2021 17:17, boB Stepp wrote: I'm not using notmuch's tagging facility; I only use it for search. And that infrequently. It is this facility that I especially find intriguing if I can make it do what I hope. Notmuch itself lives outside mutt. You set it up with "notmuch setup" and keep it up to date with the "notmuch new" command. (See "man notmuch-setup" and "man notmuch-new".) I have gathered this much so far. I will probably go ahead and install it and notmuch-mutt and see what I can easily make it do. Apparently NeoMutt has integrated notmuch-mutt into their distribution. Out of curiosity, do the Mutt developers have any inclinations in this direction? I've a script for performing a notmuch search and building a result Maildir containing the search results, and popping up that Maildir in mutt: https://hg.sr.ht/~cameron-simpson/css/browse/bin/notmuch-search?tip and I routinely invoke it via a stub script with a shorter name which includes the -t option (includes threads containing the matching messages). Will look at this soon, but I wonder if you have independently have developed similar functionality to what notmuch-mutt is supposed to supply? Can someone clarify what I can and cannot do with notmuch from *within* Mutt? Provide more informative online articles then perhaps I have found? You could easily write a mutt macro to invoke such a search from within mutt itself. I haven't myself. I just issue a search from the command line via my script. Are you thinking of something like this on the ArchLinux Wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Notmuch#Integrating_with_mutt -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Truncated link in html email
This was rejected from the Mutt server the first time. Am resending... On 21/02/08 07:04PM, boB Stepp wrote: Just now I came across one of those html emails that Mutt + urlview does not seem to be able to handle. This was an email from the clinic I go to that has embedded a "CLICK TO CHECK-IN" button. Upon opening it in Mutt, hitting "v" to view attachments, hitting to view it with w3m and finally Ctrl-B to bring up urlview of the links I found that the button's link was truncated. What would cause this and how might I remedy the situation for the future? TIA! -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
How to use/integrate "notmuch" with Mutt
My online research into "notmuch" does not seem to be giving my expected results. My _expectations_ going into this were that with "notmuch" I could: 1) Open an email in Mutt. 2) Based on that email and its contents assign relevant tags to the email via notmuch. These tags would prove useful in the future when searching for tagged content. 3) From within Mutt I could initiate a notmuch search across _all_ of my mail directories. After notmuch returns the search results I could open any of these emails from within Mutt. 4) Et cetera. Meaning similar types of actions initiated from *within* Mutt. That seems to be key. Perhaps I am misunderstanding what I am finding online. I see that installing notmuch from my system's package manager should be easy, though I probably won't get the latest, greatest. Initial configuration would seems to be easily done from the command line. Initial indexing seems to be easily done from the command line. It looks like I need to install the notmuch-mutt package. But after that it does not appear obvious from what I am reading that my above expectations are realistic. Can someone clarify what I can and cannot do with notmuch from *within* Mutt? Provide more informative online articles then perhaps I have found? TIA! -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Re: My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues
I thought I would update folks on what I have done and solicit feedback as indicated. On 21/01/31 09:16PM, boB Stepp wrote: 1) I eventually want to migrate all of my Gmail to ProtonMail. I will probably never entirely get rid of Gmail... Based on previous advice here I am in the process of setting up my local Mutt infrastructure to be able to handle multiple email accounts. My local mail file structure is now: ~ / Mail / Gmail / Archive / Drafts / Inbox / Sent / Spam / Trash / ProtonMail Contents are Maildir format. I have eliminated all of the labeling/nested labeling I had applied to my Gmail account and reduced the IMAP accessibility to only see the above labels with the caveat that "Archive" is on the Gmail side "All Mail". I hope I don't regret the labeling removal! Today's task is to understand and install/configure "notmuch" to search through this locally stored mail. 2) I would like to remove all email storage from the cloud, that is, whether Gmail or ProtonMail, ... For now I am abandoning this goal as it was pointed out that I might want to access certain archived emails from my phone or some other device outside of my PC. I still wonder, though, if I should pare down what is stored in the Gmail cloud to the absolute minimum necessary, but retain the full archive on my PC? But this may be too hard and time-intensive and would appear to violate the bidirectional syncing between my PC and Gmail. 3) I would like my local storage of my emails to allow for me to store certain content types in sensible folders... Hopefully "notmuch" will make this goal unnecessary. 4) I would like to be able to quickly search through all locally stored emails... "notmuch" 5) I would like to be able to auto-backup locally stored emails on my PC to another hard drive on my local network. I guess this would be facilitated by a sensible organization of my PC's email storage? Remains to be implemented. The above folder structure should make this trivial to accomplish. Using the above folder structure I have installed isync/mbsync and msmtp. Both programs can easily handle multiple email accounts. Currently I only have Gmail setup, but once I have worked out all of the details, I will add my ProtonMail account and start the transition from Gmail to ProtonMail. I have setup a crontab job (My first ever!) to run mbsync every five minutes. Mutt checks the local mail much more frequently. Probably should make this a similar time interval to the crontab interval. I was concerned that if there were to be a network interruption or when my router reboots at 3 AM that mbsync would hang, but after one day of this it did not. I do have a question about this though. The original crontab command to run was: killall mbsync &>/dev/null; /usr/bin/mbsync -a -qq The thought was that if mbsync hung up due to a connectivity issue then the "killall mbsync" would solve this and reissue the command afresh. But I could never get this to work. When I checked my crontab logs I saw: Feb 8 01:35:01 Dream-Machine1 CRON[612121]: (bob) CMD (killall mbsync &>/dev/null; /usr/bin/mbsync -a -qq ) Feb 8 01:35:01 Dream-Machine1 CRON[612119]: (CRON) info (No MTA installed, discarding output) I never got this to work and I do not understand why it does not work. Can anyone shed any light on this? So I changed the command to: mbsync -a -qq and everything has been working. I was curious as to what would happen at 3 AM when my router would reboot. I got: Feb 8 03:00:01 Dream-Machine1 CRON[614314]: (bob) CMD (mbsync -a -qq ) Feb 8 03:00:24 Dream-Machine1 CRON[614312]: (CRON) info (No MTA installed, discarding output) Hmm. The same "No MTA installed, discarding output" as with the originally worded command. More information, but I still do not see why this message is generated. Anyway, so far, results-wise, I am extremely pleased with the improved responsiveness of Mutt. I thought Mutt was fast when it was doing all of the IMAP/smtp stuff itself. Now it is crazy instantaneous access to the local mail stores! Really like it!! One concern based on earlier discussion in this thread. I am now using msmtp as my MTA client. What will happen if I send an email when, for whatever reason, Gmail connectivity is broken? Will it get resent? Will I get a notification? I do not understand msmtp well enough (yet) to answer this. I suppose I could experiment and disconnect from my network, send an email and see what happens... Now on to "notmuch" and see what I can do about searching through my currently unlabeled/untagged email store. Any further guidance is always both solicited and welcome! Thanks for all of the help to date. -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Re: My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues
to figure out how to get my terminal (GNOME Terminal 3.36.2) to access the external speakers connected to my PC. But this is a minor issue for sure. Thanks for everyone's thoughts to date! -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Re: My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues
On Sun, Jan 24, 2021 at 08:40:25PM -0800, Felix Finch wrote: On 20210124, 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. I had this problem after my ex-employer switched to a Lookout mail system. Sometimes mutt would stay connected for several days, then disconnect within seconds or minutes on every re-open until I gave up and waited an hour or two before connecting again, stable for hours. This was a pretty constant pattern for several years for various versions of both mutt and neomutt under Ubunto 18.04 and 20.04. I have been experimenting. I wondered if I went to a more recent version of Mutt if any of my issues would go away, particularly this one. I don't have much experience with snap packages, but found that they had Mutt 2.0.3 available, so I gave it a go. After two days of use this issue did not happen. Nor did the issue of read Gmail messages being displayed as unread rear its head. But the snap package is a confined snap, which led to a bunch of irritations since I could not escape from its confines to do "normal" things. Research did not reveal any workarounds, so I searched for an "easy" way to get the latest, greatest Mutt, v. 2.0.5. Heavy sigh. Compiling from source seemed to be the only way. I tried this once before with mixed results. Cameron was right! It gets easier with practice. I now have Mutt 2.0.5 successfully running. And so far things seem to be working very well indeed! Still looking into how to best handle some of these html emails, but I think I now have that nuked out, too. Thanks to everyone that offered suggestions! -- Wishing you only the best, boB Stepp
Re: My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues
On Sun, Jan 24, 2021 at 11:46 PM ಚಿರಾಗ್ ನಟರಾಜ್ wrote: > I wrote up a blog post a while back on dealing with multiple inboxes in Mutt > (in fact, I'm writing this from Mutt and sending it through ProtonMail, so it > *is* possible!): > https://chiraag.me/blog/2019/08/21/managing-multiple-email-accounts-with-mutt-and-fetchmail/ > > My setup involves two moving parts (mutt and fetchmail+getmail_maildir), but > I have never run into this issue. However, because fetchmail uses the unread > status as a flag of which emails to fetch, all downloaded emails are marked > as 'read' on the server, which can make things a bit annoying. Possibly > another mail retrieval agent (like getmail, for example) would solve that > issue. This will be helpful once I attempt to transition to ProtonMail. Thanks! boB Stepp
My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues
Apologies upfront for sending this from within Gmail web interface instead of Mutt! I have been using Mutt (v. 1.13.2, Linux Mint 20.1) off and on for a few months now. Cameron Simpson was a great help in getting me started. I can send and receive email via IMAP/SMTP with my Gmail account. I have a cobbled together muttrc file and mailcap file that seem to get the job (mostly) done, but I have a few things that are keeping me from going whole-hearted Mutt. Of course whatever issues I am having probably stem from my ignorance and lack of technical chops. Here are some of the things that are bothersome that I have not been able to solve: 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. 2) Read mail becomes inexplicably returned to a "new" status, both in Mutt and in Gmail when I am using Mutt, but do not have the Gmail web interface open or if I have both open. However, if I only use the Gmail interface and keep Mutt deactivated this does not happen. And this is somewhat random happening as well, but within the course of each day it *will* happen. I can clear the "new" status and it will reappear. It only happens to a few emails in my list at any given time, but tends to be a similar contiguous block of emails. 3) I initially started trying to map my various Gmail folders to Mutt, but Mutt seemed to put emails into Gmail folders unexpectedly. For instance if I received emails from the aforementioned Cameron via the Python Tutor list and replied to the Tutor list without cc'ing Cameron, his future emails in that thread might appear in a Gmail folder where I had kept other emails from Cameron. This was quite puzzling to me. It only went away when I limited my muttrc to just +INBOX and Trash. 4) Despite setting "mailboxes = +INBOX" and "set beep_new", I never ever heard a beep when new mail arrived, though other system notifications both popup and beep when those events happen, such as a Google calendar notification. 5) I am able to view HTML emails via w3c, but I get weekly (and some daily) emails from news aggregation services like Pycoders Weekly, TLDR, etc., that have embedded links that never show up in the w3c display. If I find I want to view an interesting article I have to fire up the Gmail interface and click on it there. I have not been able to resolve this one and it is quite annoying to seemingly have to leave Mutt to access these articles in my browser. I'm sure this is a lack of understanding on my part, but I have not figured it out yet. Other explicit attachments like pdfs, image formats, etc. I have no trouble opening up from within Mutt nor do I have trouble with explicit links that do show up that I am able to open from within Mutt and display in my browser. These are the main troubles I am having. I would like to eventually transition from Gmail to ProtonMail, but that adds another layer of complexity as ProtonMail needs bridge software installed and configured for Mutt. Until I solve my Gmail dilemmas it seems pointless to attempt the potentially more complex ProtonMail configuration to come. Thanks in advance! boB Stepp
