On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 12:37:12PM +0200, Christian Ebert wrote: > > I still think http://www.mutt.org/doc/devel/manual.html#patterns > covers a lot of what you want. Or you have to explain more > clearly in what way your "categories" differ from a limiting > pattern.
Thanks, I'll check that out. I think there are some important differences between search patterns and categories: I would need to know exactly which pattern will show only those messages I want to see, and all of them. I don't know such patterns. I might have an idea of what I could search for, but it only means that I eventually have to spend a lot of time searching and trying to figure out search patterns. I would have to keep figuring out search patterns and categorizing the same messages over and over again by means of search patterns each time I want to work with any. I take it you can have only one pattern in use to limit the display because mutt doesn't have a way to display mail going by which of the search patterns apply to it. Categories are not volatile like search patterns are. They are there when I need them and when I don't. My inbox isn't messed up anymore with all kinds of different mail because the mails are sorted into categories. > Once you're done you can tag those messages with the same pattern > and move them to their final storage. But they need to remain in the inbox until I'm done with them. > >> This discussion about Sup on mutt-dev might be worth a look. > > Forgot the link: http://marc.info/?t=124685615600001&r=1&w=2 > > The thread also mentions the X-Label patch: > > http://home.uchicago.edu/~dgc/mutt/#x-label Yeah ... This patch might be very helpful, but I wonder how the messages get those labels. When you have the patch, can you edit the label with mutt and then use it to limit the display? If you can edit the labels, I could use it to create categories. But having to edit all the labels instead of just assigning an existing label to a mail (as another way of assigning a mail to a category) would still be inconvenient and prone to errors (mistype a label, and you never find that mail again). It still wouldn't solve the problem of keeping a conversation together, i. e. sent mail together with received mail, preferably displayed as a thread. Without categories, there's probably no way to solve that. > But! If you want to search *across* mailboxes (sorry if I didn't > entirely grasp your example) I would use mairix, also mentioned > in above thread. Yeah, I tried mairix a while ago when I wanted to find a particular information that I knew would be stored in a mail somewhere. It worked, but it's rare that I do that. Once a message is out of the inbox, I usually don't need to dig it up again. But if mails would keep the information to which categories they once belonged, it wouldn't matter at all in which maildir they are stored as long as this feature is available. Mutt would need to keep a list of categories that aren't in use anymore, or have to be able to recreate such categories from information stored in the mail. Once you found the category, you can have all mail displayed that ever belonged to the category, and you would eventually even get references to other categories. Forget mairix --- you can be lucky when you can think of the right search pattern, and even if you get results, you never know if there is another mail with exactly the information you were looking for, but it wasn't found because you'd have to use a different pattern. Searching for mail with patterns isn't very useful. MUAs should be able to do much better than that. > > Anyway, what is sup? Another MUA? > > Yes: http://sup.rubyforge.org/ I'll try it out on a copy of my mails. What I don't like about it is that they are using some libraries that aren't maintained anymore, and they already seem to have bugs coming up because of that. That doesn't speak for the reliability of sup.
