Re: [Fsfe-uk] Administrivia: html duplicates

[Chris Croughton]

On Sun, Jan 27, 2008 at 04:30:36PM +0000, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> 
> Hi Chris,
> 
> > > Whilst you're listing text-based mail clients, there's nmh, but it
> > > doesn't like HTML either.
> > > 
> > >     http://www.nongnu.org/nmh/
> > >     http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/overall/whymh.html
> > > 
> > > There's not a lot of development work being done on it these days
> > > though.
> > 
> > Ye gods, I'd managed to forget mh.  Self-defence I think.  Even the
> > old mali(1) client was less bad.  It was probably fine when people
> > only got a couple of messages a day and didn't need to thread
> > conversations, but even it havving a command line interface doesn't
> > get my vote.
> 
> On the contrary, it was created in order to cope with a heavy mail load
> each day, though possibly not heavy by today's standards.  They ran a
> support desk IIRC.  I find I can type commands to filter this 20,000
> email folder quickly, giving the results names for later use.
> 
>     # Search all emails in current folder for those with a subject
>     # containing `horizon' that are from washington and were sent over a
>     # week ago.
>     pick -sub horizon -and -from washington -and -before -7 -sequence horiz
>     pick -su horizon -an -f washington -an -b -7 -seq horiz
> 
>     # List the first ten, one per line.
>     scan horiz:10
> 
> With personal ~/bin scripts like -sub for `pick ${0##*/} "$@" && scan
> lp' and `sc' for `scan last:20' it gets quicker.  And I can mix its
> commands up with awk, sort, etc., for the more unusual cases.

That's fine if you already know what the subjects are, etc.  With
ordinary email lists I don't, so mutt threads them and positions me at
the first unread one, and I can see the thread tree.  If I want the next
unread I hit TAB, I can go up and down easily, etc.

I can see that it would be useful to do the sort of things you describe,
but I've got grepmail which does most of that on mbox files.

> Pine seemed to be too tedious for frequent use, and although my fingers
> breathe vi I could never see the point of them learning mutt just to do
> email.  That was from years ago though, perhaps things have improved.

Well, most of the usual commands in mutt are vi anyway -- j for down and
k for up for instance (or you can use the cursor keys).  Enter to see a
message, r to reply, f to forward.  Pretty intuitive.  No menus.  No
GUI.

Chris C