Greetings, Although I'm sure my reasons are not unique, I thought I'd express them so that perhaps they will explain my frustration at getting adequate mail processing.
Previous to my current attempts, I (like many others) used mozilla and/or kmail to read/sort/file/save my mail. Quite frankly, I got tired of having to fire up mozilla and or use KDE apps (when I'm not using KDE as a wm). I also found that the storage limit on my ISP mail account forced me to either receive digested versions of mailing lists or open a my former mail agent(s) every few hours in order to download the accumulated volume (I average about 10-12M of mail a day --- many lists). This was obviously undoable. I then discovered that I could "fetch" my mail on regular intervals an have it available locally, thereby constantly freeing up space at my ISP mail account. BTW - my ISP doesn't offer direct transmission of mail on anything other than commercial accounts. I have a DSL line so the regular traffic to/from my ISP has been no hassle. "Great", thought I, ooops wait .... mozilla ~can't~ read mail from a a local mailbox. It only offers ISP mail retrieval. Which left me with unnecessary use of kmail. Additionally, kmail has had a ~number~ of problems lately, even in the stable (all potato) system that I am running. So I thought I'd investigate non GUI (therefore no wm) dependent MUA's. Mutt seemed like the perfect choice. Not being comfortable yet with configuring fetchmail, I decided to use 'getmail' (see previous threads). This program works fine, but I am still ~unable~ to presort my mail in various folders. Using getmail allows me to schedule retrievals from my ISP; my mail is happily waiting for me. The problem with this is that often, I have 300+ emails to then sort through one by one. I imnagine I could use those nifty 'save/send/folder ...' hooks for processing of mail ~after~ I've recieved it, but I'd like to be able to read mail from 'debian-user','[EMAIL PROTECTED]','[EMAIL PROTECTED]' all in their own folders, which I can then ~delete~ specific messages from. That's the one thing that GUI mail apps have going for them. ~But~ 'kmail', 'evolution', and 'cronos' are buggy; the ~stable~ version of 'balsa' that I have has segfaulted since day one; and an exhaustive search for mail clients on freshmeat resulted in a tone of MUA's for IMAP and/or POP3, but very few for reading ~local~ mail. Hence, my doggedness and frustration in getting the combo of fetchmail/(exim)/procmail/mutt to work as I would like it to and am led to believe that it can be configured to work. Simply, I want mail to be retrieved, pre-sorted, and ready for viewing/saving/disposal whenever I log on to my computer. Any thoughts? Many thanks for allowing the possible rant ... C. Masters
