Re: Mutt and mailboxes
-- David P James <dpjames@rogers.com> wrote
(on Thursday, 03 October 2002, 05:27 PM -0400):
> 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):
> >
> >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).
If I remember correctly, though, Mozilla can use IMAP (and I do, because
I use it on my Windows box when I need to read mail) -- which means
that if you use it as an IMAP mail reader, it will leave the mail where
it's delivered.
You might also want to look into Evolution -- I'd been using Mozilla for
mail for awhile until Evolution matured, and found it to be a good GUI
mail client. It's standards compliant, which means that it will read
mail wherever it is, thus leaving it in a central location for other
mail clients to read it.
> 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.
Actually, if you set up your mail server to deliver to Maildir (either
in the MTA's configuration or through procmail, which is what you'd do
if you were to set up an IMAP server), it would go to your user
account's ~/Maildir/ directory, which would act kind of like your spool.
>From there, you could use clients like Mozilla, which semi-require their
own mail directory formats, to contact the IMAP server, and other
clients, such as mutt, kmail, etc, to simply use the Maildir format
(these other clients could also use the IMAP protocol, as then the
configuration would be standard).
> 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.
Of course, these are just suggestions -- if you've got it working, and
it works the way you want it to -- good. I offer these suggestions as
somebody who fiddled around with email clients for years, always having
to change formats and mail spool locations whenever I found a new one
that used a slightly different storage format. Standards exist to make
such fiddling unnecessary -- which is why a fetchmail/procmail/IMAP
setup makes a lot of sense if you'll be using multiple clients to read
your mail.
--
Matthew Weier O'Phinney
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