Re: more mutt questions
On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 01:02:26AM +0200, Richard Lyons wrote:
> To compare with mutt, I have simply opened the ~/Mail directory in which
> the folders are, and tried to read new mail. Unread mail is not
> identified by default, so I went through a handful of the 70-odd
> folders and marked some recent mail as unread. Then I tried to find it
> again. The read next unread instruction in mutt appears to only
> operate inside a folder. The folders containing unread mail are not
> flagged in any way. I can only find the 'unread' mail by opening every
> folder (c then ? then scroll to the next folder and press enter -- not
> very simple) and looking for entries marked N.
Set up 'mailboxes' in the order you want, then 'c' <Enter>, repeat until
you run out of mail. I usually don't bother looking at the list of
folders with unread mail in regular use, unless I have some special
reason; I keep the important folders at the top of 'mailboxes' so that
everything else waits in line behind it.
> I'm baffled. If so many d-u members use it there must be a simpler
> strategy other than reading all mail in the inbox and manually sorting
> it to folders _after_ reading.
procmail is your friend (or Exim filters or maildrop or whatever MDA is
your bag). You don't want to do the sorting in mutt.
> Even supposing I eventually manage to set up spam filters to cut out the
> 150-200 spam messages each day, I would prefer to deal quickly with the
> categories I see as important and to be able to defer the less urgent
> ones when I feel like it. And in kmail, all I need to do to check the
> spam is to open the spam folder and scan the 'subject' and 'from'
> columns - move any misfiltered items (very rare) and delete everything
> else unopened. In mutt it seems that I would need to c-?-scroll-enter
> to the spam folder, then mark each message for deletion.
You can type in the name of the folder rather than scrolling, if you
prefer. Learn to use tag-pattern (T - you might want to tag everything
in a mailbox with 'T ""', for instance, or everything that's not deleted
with 'T !~D') and tag-prefix (;) to apply a command to all tagged
messages.
> And then, I have found no method to get back to the mail spool file that
> is displayed by default at opening, other than laboriously stepping
> back through the directory tree from the ~/Mail directory, or typing
> the spooldirectory by hand, or closing the application and reopening
> it.
'c !'
> This isn't intended to be a rant. I just want to know how mutt can get
> near to the convenience of a gui mail client like kmail.
As is the case for many of the most powerful text-mode tools around, the
convenience and flexibility is in macros and configurability. It won't
be as quick for a first-time user, but I can drive mutt considerably
faster than I could drive any graphical mail interface.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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