mutt c.f. MH: tell us more [LWN.net]

mutt c.f. MH: tell us more

Posted Jun 17, 2004 13:53 UTC (Thu) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029)
In reply to: mutt c.f. MH: tell us more by nicku
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to mail clients: introduction

I think the "restrictiveness" that MH users (myself included) feel is not so much specific to mutt, but rather driven by the flexibility of MH. The fact that I can compose a message or a reply and while that's still active check out new mail (or cross-reference another message) is extremely useful, and what prompted me to switch from elm. I've also had situations where I'll be writing a message to a friend, and in the meantime another message comes in that demands immediate response. With a "drafts" folder in MH, this is no problem. Putting aside a message for later is also easy, though I'm sure mutt also has this capability.

Granted, some or all of these things can be done with the graphical mail clients. However, if you're using a terminal-based client, it's really tough to beat the level of flexibility in MH, and that flexibility comes from the fact that it's not a single client, but a suite of applications that run on the same directory structure.

That being said, MH isn't the only mail software I use. Since my mail has to be fetched via IMAP, I use fetchmail (both at work and at home). At work my script for fetchmail passes the messages to procmail for filtering, and I check the messages marked as spam using mutt. That's mainly because I've had some spam messages cause inc to segfault.

Another mail suite I could point out is IM, which seems to be included in mew (at least on RH). It's MH-like, and uses the same directories. It knows imap, though, which is nice, though it doesn't know krb5 in the context of imap. IM and MH are fairly easy to combine -- the only thing I had to do was use "imget" instead of "inc" -- but it doesn't update the MH context, so after getting new mail "curr" isn't updated.

(Log in to post comments)

mutt c.f. MH: tell us more

Posted Jun 17, 2004 15:29 UTC (Thu) by leonid (subscriber, #4891) [Link]

Putting aside a message for later is also easy, though I'm sure mutt also has this capability.

Yup. It's called 'postpone' in Mutt-speak. :)

mutt postpone and remote access

Posted Jun 17, 2004 21:34 UTC (Thu) by nealmcb (subscriber, #20740) [Link]

I love mutt. I always run mutt sessions within `screen -S mutt` and when I want remote access, I just ssh to my box and connect to mutt via `screen -d -r mutt`

One problem with postpone is that when a postponed message is
later sent, the "replied to" flag (as used by ~Q) is not set.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mutt-dev/message/12048
This is well-known, and won't be changed. It would be rather hard to
let mutt keep track of what messages went where. [Thomas Roessler]

I also wish my postponed mail could be handled well by other mailers
like gnus. But I haven't found a convenient way to do that.

I also want to pipe the mutt index to a command or save it in a file, but see no option to do that other than doing cut-and-paste on successive pages of the screen output.

mutt postpone and remote access

Posted Jun 18, 2004 6:06 UTC (Fri) by leonid (subscriber, #4891) [Link]

Did you try script(1)? It is very useful for saving all sorts of console outputs in the file. I didnt' try it with mutt though.