A huge thank you to those who posted here and sent private email. I now have a much better working mutt, and I can send emails too. I'm not quite sure how I managed the latter, but I'm not complaining ;) There are a few things I still need to fix, but most of that is just the learning curve. I discovered a nice utility, the .muttrc builder, that has a bit of a guide to what you can do within the config file. Tony also sent me a script to give me an idea how to better list my mailboxes with Perl, which will prove useful to use for learning how to extend the capabilities of mutt. I would still like to be able to use a GUI client when I'm on the desktop, but I don't mind waiting now to figure that out.
I have now caught up with three people who have sent me ideas and/or patches for three of my distributions. Now I just need to find the time to implement them :)
How do you like mutt so far?
Btw, I have some suggestions to try in Email for procrastinators. Particularly, using threaded view as the default and saving sent mail to the inbox is a combination that everyone should at least try once.
Re:
barbie on 2005-11-25T17:15:30
I'm getting there. I still have a few tricks to learn, but it's not all bad. I've got used to the drag-n-drop of a GUI, so I find I'm having to think a bit more.
I do have threading set up as default, but I find I miss new entries in some mailboxes. I imagine I should be able to flip between threaded and date order, but I haven't got around to looking that up.
The next hurdle I need to address (pun intended) is the address book. I have a lot of people I mail, some have more than one address, and it would be so much easier for me to type a shortcut and for mutt to complete the To: line for me. I've seen a few web pages on this, but haven't yet had the time to actually do anything. It's on my TODO list
:) Re:
Aristotle on 2005-11-25T18:11:46
You can change sort order by hitting [o]. (mutt will prompt you with the available orders and their shortcuts, so you don’t need to memorise those.)
The addressbook is handled by the
aliascommand:
alias ap Aristotle Pagaltzis <pagaltzis@gmx.de>With that you could send me mail by saying it’s To: ap. Don’t miss that tab completion for aliases is available on all email address prompts in mutt!
These commands are usually kept in a file customarily called
aliases. You point mutt towards it usingset alias_file=/path/to/aliases. If you hit [a], mutt will extract the From: address from the mail you’re viewing (or pointing at), and will append the appropriate command to the aliases file after prompting you for the details. Note however that it won’t actually read this file unless you also havesourcein your/path/to/aliases .muttrc– so the aliases file is effectively a secondary.muttrcas far as mutt is concerned.This custom of keeping the two separate files developed because the
aliascommand format is understood by more mailers than just mutt, and they can all use the same file if you do it this way. But since I don’t use anything but mutt, I gave up on this separation. Instead I just keep my aliases at the bottom of my.muttrc. That allows me to keep aliases for mailing list addresses and their correspondingsubscribecommands next to each other, neatly solving the headache it would otherwise be to keep the aliases in synch with distantsubscribecommands.Re:
barbie on 2005-11-25T20:37:33
Superb. Thanks for all that, it's going to prove very useful. I think I owe you much beer
:) Ever thought about writing a book?
Re:
Aristotle on 2005-11-25T21:20:16
A book? Heh, not really; certainly not about mutt. You think?
I did go back to collect my comments from your journal entries, though. I want to tidy them up, flesh out the result, and eventually post it as an intro/tutorial on plasmasturm.
And thanks for the beer offer.
:-)
