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

mutt c.f. MH: tell us more

Posted Jun 21, 2004 12:54 UTC (Mon) by wookey (subscriber, #5501)
In reply to: mutt c.f. MH: tell us more by nicku
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to mail clients: introduction

'How do you find mutt restrictive?'.

The thing that really irritates me about mutt is its modal interface - i.e. the way I can only edit/view one message at a time and only have one mailbox open. I used to use 'Marcel' on RISC OS and that let me have as many mail folders as I liked open, and as many messages visible as I had room for, but still integrated with my favourite text editor. As synthesis of emails is what I do most of the day, this was great.

When I moved to GNU/Linux for mail I chose mutt and generally like it a lot, but to get mail from another message you need to quit editing the current one and postpone it, then open up another and save it somewhere like tmp then go back to the original and read in the other message in order to cut and paste.

Also the long delay in switching between mailboxes (Many of mine take >60 seconds to swtich between) makes for real inefficiency when referring to mails in a different mailbox/folder.

There may be solutions to these problems - I would love to hear about them. Just being able to 'pre-open' mailboxes would help a lot.

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mutt c.f. MH: tell us more

Posted Jun 24, 2004 7:47 UTC (Thu) by joib (guest, #8541) [Link]

Nothing prevents you from starting another mutt process in another shell. Or if you just quickly want to check a detail in another email, suspending the editor with ctrl-z and then starting another mutt process in the same shell works equally well. I use it all the time.

Also the long delay in switching between mailboxes (Many of mine take >60 seconds to swtich between) makes for real inefficiency when referring to mails in a different mailbox/folder.

I guess that's a "feature" of the mbox format if you have big mailboxes? mutt also supports qmail-style Maildirs as well as MH mailboxes, which might help?

Personally, I save received and sent mail to separate mailboxes, a new file each month (you can do this automagically with mutt). That keeps the mailboxes reasonably small.

mutt c.f. MH: tell us more

Posted Jun 30, 2004 18:39 UTC (Wed) by robot101 (subscriber, #3479) [Link]

For the sake of completeness, recent versions of mutt support indexing of mboxes, but I've actually just replaced wookey's mail server with dovecot, which keeps its own indices, so IMAP should go a lot faster now hopefully! :D