Re: Mutt and mailboxes
Matthew Weier O'Phinney was roused into action on 10/03/02 09:30 and wrote:
-- David P James <dpjames@rogers.com> wrote
(on Wednesday, 02 October 2002, 11:05 PM -0400):
I've recently started using mutt remotely when I'm on campus to check
for email that Mozilla is automatically downloading to my Debian box at
home
Not to be contrary, but why are you having Mozilla do the downloading?
Fetchmail is designed for this... and once it has retrieved the mail for
you, you could have any of your mail clients look at it directly on your
machine easily, as it would be in a standard place.
Because;
(1) It hadn't occurred to me to do that, and
(2) It kind of depends on what happens once the file is on the computer.
Mozilla can be told to place its mail file anywhere, but it doesn't
appear to have the option (like Mutt or to some degree Kmail) of
'directly' reading a mailfile - Mozilla is set up to download and then
read, not to read only. That's not to say that Mozilla's mail file can't
be modified by something other than itself, it can - you just don't want
to be doing that when Mozilla is actually running (say, when I'm home,
which would mean that I'd have to shut off fetchmail whenever Mozilla
Mail starts up). It would be nice if Moz could be told to read mbox
files directly, but it can't. I'd even consider switching away from Moz,
but I have yet to find any other [GUI] mail client that handles the
concept of sub-folders as Moz does, or that can sort email by 'Order
Received' rather than simply by date. My long-term hope is that Moz gets
improved or that Minotaur will make up for Moz's deficiencies (mailing
list handling, as another example).
On the other hand, if fetchmail downloads it to somewhere in /var/mail
and I manage to set up a server for other mail clients to "download"
from, would that not result in having an mbox file in multiple places,
thereby wasting space? (ie wherever fetchmail puts it *and* also in the
usual Mozilla location when Moz "downloads" it?). I suppose I could
still tell Mozilla to delete the file from the server (eg, /var/mail),
but then this seems to be a lot of extra file swapping, configuring as
well as installing another programor two for what would appear to be no
real gain.
As it is now, Mozilla downloads mail and anything else can read it
wherever Mozilla puts it. I just need to be able to configure Mutt to do
that, which I have now been able to do.
I believe somebody else already noted this, but .muttrc is not created
on its own; you have to create your own. When you do (simply use your
favorite editor -- likely VIM if you're using mutt! -- and create a
~/.muttrc file), you'll need a line such as:
set folder=/path/to/spoolfile
Once this is in there, you won't need to use the -f switch.
I highly suggest reading the mutt manual; it's included with the Debian
distro at /usr/share/doc/mutt/html/manual.html. And also look into
fetchmail and procmail -- they are excellent tools for grabbing mail
from remote locations and delivering it to specific files/directories.
I had looked at the manual and the man page but I hadn't figured out
that Mutt doesn't create a .muttrc file when first invoked. I saw
references to it but I'm a little bit leary of creating a file that,
from the documentation, *sounds* as if it ought to be there already.
Anyway, problem solved now.
Thanks,
--
David P. James
4th Year Economics Student
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario
http://members.rogers.com/dpjames/
The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.
-Dr. Leonard McCoy, Star Trek IV
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