Re: [gentoo-user] mutt configuration advice

[Alan McKinnon]

I have travelled exactly the same path as you, and feel all your pain.

At first I used claws but after a few months it got unbearably slow when
dealing with calendars and invites, so I switched to Thunderbird. It
works well enough for me.

Let's first establish your needs, I see a few points that don't make
much real-world sense.

You retrieve your mail from Gmail, and then selectively delete stuff
from Google's servers. Why are you doing that? Gmail is built to archive
everything forever and most people's mail quickly gets to be a lot of
mail. I can understand leaving all of it there in an archive, or
deleting all of it, depending on how you like to do your backups, but I
don't understand the selective delete part. Looks like a lot of manual
work on your part.

I wouldn't try using mail clients to directly access the same local
mailbox structure. No two clients work the same way, they all index
mails differently, other subtle differences exist and there's always
locking issues. Mutt and kmail might not respect each other's turf...

I recommend a man in the middle - a local IMAP serve of your choice that
works fast for you and stores mail acceptably for you. Fetch your mail
using fetchmail or one of it's friends, use procmail to filter it and
feed it into your IMAP server, and connect to IMAP locally using any GUI
mail client you choose. This gives you a standard interface (IMAP)
instead of a weird interface (disk files store wherever however) and all
locking issues just go away.

The above is what I did (and delete everything off Google's servers so I
do my own backups), and it makes most of the rest of your post redundant
and no longer apply.


On 27/05/2013 14:49, Mick wrote:
> I would be grateful if some kind soul guided my hand on configuring mutt to
> behave like ... errm ... kmail!  O_o
>
> Before you have a go, please let me explain myself.  I love kmail, or better
> said, I *used to* love kmail as it was back then when no semantic desktop, no
> mysql database, no akonadi, no redland and what not, was imposed upon us.  I
> have no need for anything else than what kmail used to do back in the latter
> part of KDE3.  A simple flat file address book (OK, use sqlite if you really
> must) and the simple search for messages it used to offer, was all that I ever
> needed.  In particular I found its integration with kgpg and kleopatra
> extremely useful, and this is what has stopped me moving to other GUI mail
> clients.  I tried many of them was surprised to see how much better kmail was
> for my needs.
>
> Anyway, this was back then.  Now kmail 1 is heading towards extinction and it
> is a matter of time before devs pull the plug and push us all to the kmail 2
> abomination.  Since the full KDEPIM semantic bloatware is not to my liking and
> I do not wish to allow kmail 2 to irreversibly lose my thousands of mail
> messages, I thought of giving mutt a closer look.  I had used mutt on and off
> in a simple IMAP set up.  Now however I would like to use it on my laptop,
> with the need for offline access to read and draft/edit my messages, multiple
> accounts and quirky settings.  There are a number of things that feel awkward
> with mutt and I am not sure if this is because mutt is just not for me, or
> because it takes much more effort to configure functions, which on a modern
> GUI client are just a click away.
>
> So, let me start with the basics.  I am using Gmail, for which I have
> configured kmail to POP and download my messages in a local maildir without
> deleting these from the server.  The Gmail settings on the server show:
>
>   POP enabled
>   Leave POPped messages on server
>   IMAP enabled
>
> With the above settings (not sure if they veer from the original Gmail
> defaults) I am able to POP the Gmail server inbox and rather importantly I'm
> also able to 'sync' with any sent messages on the server.  I will not pretend
> to understand how the latter is performed - haven't sniffed the packets to see
> what happens - but this is what I get:
>
>  - When I send a message from kmail it will be saved in my local maildir sent
> gmail subfolder and will also show up in the Sent folder of the Gmail webmail.
>
>  - When I send a message from the Gmail webmail the message will show up as
> new (and downloaded if I click on it) when I launch my kmail.
>
>  - This sync'ing happens once only.  If I thereafter delete a message on the
> server the local copy is not affected and vice versa.  This is useful for me
> because I can delete locally any messages which are not particularly
> important, but might want to refer to them in the distant future.  Delete
> messages on the server that I only want to keep locally.  Delete both when I
> don't want to keep them whatsoever.
>
> However, I am at a loss as to how I should configure my .muttrc to achieve
> this functionality.  Ideally I would also like to replicate my current kmail
> maildir folder structure in mutt, so that I can access the Gmail server with
> either client; e.g.
>
> ~/Mail/
>  |_inbox (all unfiltered messages drop in here)
>    |_.inbox.directory
>      |_.Gentoo.directory
>      |_Gentoo
>        |_cur
>        |_new
>        |_tmp
>
>
> Can you please point me in the right direction for this set up?
>


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com