Re: Mail - reasons for trying the fetchmail/procmail/mutt route
On Thu, Nov 29, 2001 at 09:35:45PM -0400, cmasters wrote:
| On Thu, Nov 29, 2001 at 06:41:01PM -0600, John Patton wrote:
| > On Thu, Nov 29, 2001 at 04:08:34PM -0400, cmasters wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Yet again, man pages, online help, and printing 100+ pages of combined
| manuals has led me back to ~here~, this mailing list. The difficulty with
| the majority of man pages and ~many~ on-line additions / rewrites is that
| they still assume a programmer is reading them. For instance, the copious
The problem is that the programmer(s) who made the software are the
only ones who know exactly what happens in each situation. Anyone can
read the source to find out what happens, but they must be a
programmer to understand it. Thus the only people with the knowledge
to write docs are programmers, and thus the docs have a programmer
slant to them. It is up to you (and everyone else) to help improve
the docs.
| pages of Mutt man include a glossary of variable that can be set from either
| the command line, or from the config file. YET, nowere in its (or the man's)
| preamble does it indicate which of these variable needs to be "set" via the
| set prefix in the config file. Some do, some don't, it's up to the reader to
| determine which through trial and error.
Variables are set with 'set', other commands are other commands and
are not variables to be set with the 'set' command. Just as an
example, "auto_view" is a command, not a variable.
| > > 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.
I've used balsa before, and it was decent (as a plain MUA, nothing
more). Mahogany is also kinda nice, though still under heavy
development. However I've found mutt to be the best of all.
| > 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.
|
| Not in my experience of having checked the websites and downloading many of
| the advertized apps. As I said many of the common GUI's are buggy currently
| and the only one that isn't ~mozilla~ does not allow for reading of local
| mail. The clever 'Account Setup Wizard' only allows POP3/IMAP and NNTP
| accounts to be set up.
Instead of trying to create an _account_ in mozilla (or netscape)
create a folder instead. IIRC the folders work in netscape at least
(4.something in windows and redhat).
-D
--
"...the word HACK is used as a verb to indicate a massive amount
of nerd-like effort." -Harley Hahn, A Student's Guide to Unix
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