Re: [gentoo-user] mutt configuration advice

[Mick]

On Monday 27 May 2013 15:28:24 Alan McKinnon wrote:
> 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.

Yes, I've given Claws a go for a couple of months.  I seem to recall I had set 
up a different MAIL directory for it.  I can't recall what I didn't like, but 
there was too much not going the way I wanted it - keyboard shortcuts, 
attachments, gpg/SMIME and its integration with the address book, etc.  After 
some time of the client getting in the way of me managing my email, I decided 
to return to kmail with some relief.

My wife was using T'bird back then and would you believe it, I convinced her 
that Kmail was better.  So she switched!  Ha, ha, ha!  I tried T'bird a few 
times and it also didn't work as I wanted it.  In particular I recall message 
bodies being chopped off half way when encrypted.  Not sure if this was an 
enigmail bug, but was a no go for me.  I haven't tried it more recently.


> 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 use Google's Gmail servers as my BIG mail back up.  The rarely performed 
selective delete is for messages that are rubbish (e.g. SPAM), messages that 
contain private info and in the long run I don't trust Google with them, 
messages that I know I won't read ever again and are just occupying space.

I know what you are thinking - I don't pay for the space, so why not leave 
them there?  Other than the odd private message which I would delete anyway, I 
am also thinking of the bandwidth and download time, when I wish to start 
afresh with a new machine/client.

I know that I could just copy over the messages from my hard drive to the new 
PC/fs, but what if I have a catastrophic failure, or theft of my 
laptop/desktop and local back ups?  Having the option to download the lot from 
Google's servers is a benefit for me.


> 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...

Yes, you are right here.  I think there are warnings out in the interworks to 
*not* access Kmail's maildir simultaneously with another mail client.  This 
can corrupt Kmail's .index files.  The trick is to delete the relevant index 
file, so that kmail can recreate it, but I am aware of this problem and would 
not be accessing the maildir at the same time with different clients.


> 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.

Ahh!  Not really.  ;-)

I recall you or some other Gentoo user in this list advocating setting up 
dovecot or some such to locally collect and store messages.  This aligns with 
the one task per tool approach that mutt's design philosophy fulfils as a 
simple MUA.  It has its advantages, but also has its disadvantages.  It 
requires me to do back ups, instead of relying on Google.  It requires me to 
run a separate server (if I were to run this on my LAN, as opposed to my 
lap/desktop) and pay for it, instead of Google's 'free' infrastructure and 
energy bill.  One more application to configure and bother myself with, on the 
unexpected occasion when configuration files need editing in a rush because 
things no longer work since the last update.

More critically, whether I run a local MRA/MTA or not, I will *still* need 
another mail client irrespective of where my messages are stored.  This is why 
I kindly ask for some person who's more experienced on configuring mutt than 
I, to give me a hand setting it up.  :-)

If this is too much off topic, feel free to reply off list.

-- 
Regards,
Mick