Re: Mail - reasons for trying the fetchmail/procmail/mutt route

[John Patton <patton66@home.com>]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2001 at 04:08:34PM -0400, cmasters wrote:
> The problem with this is that often, I have 300+ emails to then sort through
> one by one. I imnagine I could use those nifty 'save/send/folder ...' hooks
> for processing of mail ~after~ I've recieved it, but I'd like to be able to
> read mail from 'debian-user','blah@yahoogroups.com','xfce@moongroups...' all
> in their own folders, which I can then ~delete~ specific messages from.

I don't know what getmail does, but fetchmail will gather your mail
from your ISP and will send it straight to exim (or sendmail, etc) for
processing. By default, exim will use procmail to sort your mail if
you have a procmail recipe in your home directory (~/.fetchmailrc).
It's not too difficult to set up procmail rules to presort your email
into special "inboxes" in your mail dir. You can then configure mutt to
recognize those inboxes... once set up it works very efficiently.

Here is a part of my procmail file:

    MAIL=/var/spool/mail/john

    PATH=$HOME/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
    MAILDIR=$HOME/Mail
    DEFAULT=$MAIL

    :0:
    * ^from.*debian-user
    Inboxes/debian-user

    :0
    * ^from.*debian-kde
    /dev/null

Mail from debian-user get's put into the inbox ~/Mail/Inboxes/debian-user
while mail from debian-kde get's deleted (for the time being).

Here is part of my muttrc file:

    # declare inboxes (! is the default)
    mailboxes ! \
        +Inboxes/debian-user

    # refile mailing list email into specific folders after reading
    mbox-hook +Inboxes/debian-user +debian-user
    mbox-hook +Inboxes/debian-kde +debian-kde

    # declare mailing lists
    subscribe debian-user
    subscribe debian-kde

Just look at the appropriate man pages for further details. It will
require some work, but once set up will then be much easier to deal
with.

> That's the one thing that GUI mail apps have going for them. ~But~
> 'kmail', 'evolution', and 'cronos' are buggy; the ~stable~ version of
> 'balsa' that I have has segfaulted since day one; and an exhaustive
> search for mail clients on freshmeat resulted in a tone of MUA's for
> IMAP and/or POP3, but very few for reading ~local~ mail.

Most if not all of those programs can read local mail boxes. It's not
advertised because it's a totally standard feature. Being able to
directly interact with IMAP and/or POP3, OTOH, is a major selling point,
especially for people who are used to windows.

-- 
John Patton                      patton66@home.com

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those
who dream only by night." -Edgar Allen Poe