Charles Howard wrote:
[..]
It's advisable to "trim" your posts than have your correspondents do it
for you ;-)
But in the folder list only 0 shows up. If I press enter on
I just get a blank screen. I'm not trying to put emails as well
as folders in 0. I just have the one subfolder. I can see (from
the shell) that Maildir/0/journal1/new/ contains an email but
cannot get to it from within mutt.
I'm probably missing something obvious but can't see what it is.
I'm still not 100% sure about what you mean by "subfolders" or "nested
folders", but I have a feeling my initial impression was correct.
Rather than the underlying structure of the directories and files that
compose your local email repository, do you mean that you would like
mutt's browser to present you with a tree structure of folders similar
to what you can configure in Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook?
If this is the case, read on - otherwise please ignore.
Using one of the above programs, you might be set up so that if you need
to access your latest bank statement you would navigate to "Email
account 1", then to the "Personal" folder, open it, and then open the
"Bank" sub folder, where you would be able to select it for display.
I haven't bothered to set it up here in Thunderbird, but that's a lot of
mouse clicks or <Tabs> and <Arrows>.
As far as I understand it, at least where local mail is concerned, mutt
by design does not encourage this (IMHO) inefficient navigation mode and
favors presenting users with a flat list of mailboxes, keeping the
organization of the corresponding files hidden from view.
In terms of navigation, the result is that since mutt's "browser"
conveniently numbers your mailboxes sequentially, if "Bank" happens to
be mailbox number seven, you could navigate directly to your bank
statement by hitting '7' followed by <Enter><Enter>.
As you know, the list of mailboxes known to mutt is created at startup
by the "mailboxes" commands in your .muttrc, but although probably not
advisable, the actual files could live anywhere in the file system.
For instance, provided an online mailing list archive can be downloaded
in mbox format to your hard drive, you could review its contents off
line, using your efficient mail reader, with no network-related delays
and other annoyances, like so:
$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://.../mailbox-archive
and in your already-running mutt session:
:mailboxes /tmp/maibox-archive.
Access any mailbox and return to the browser to refresh the display and
you should see an additional mailbox whose contents you can manipulate
just like any of your regular mail boxes.
Actually comes in handy when you need to rebuild a thread that you
initially deleted.
But mutt is very flexible and provides a different mechanism whereby you
can access any file that lives on your local file system without
having defined it to mutt via the "mailboxes" command so long as the
file conforms to one of the supported mailbox formats.
At least this is true where the mbox format is concerned.
As a result, so as not to clutter my browser display, I chose to limit
the "mailboxes" definitions in my .muttrc to mail boxes that I
frequently access and keep less often visited ones hidden from view.
I know where they are, and to navigate to these mail boxes, I only need
to hit the 'c' key and ignoring the "Open mailbox ('?' for list):"
prompt at the bottom of the screen hit <Tab> until I see something that
looks like the output of the long form of the "ls" command.
I can then use the usual mutt keyboard actions to navigate the list of
sequentially numbered files and directories - arrow keys, 'j', 'k', or
select them by number and hit <Enter><Enter> to access them.
Mutt's status line at the bottom of the screen, just above the command
line, conveniently tells me where I am in the local file system.
On this list, item #1 corresponds to the ".." parent directory, so that
hitting '1' followed by <Enter><Enter> in quick succession takes me back
to the root of my local file system, from where I can navigate to any
other directory.
Since you can't look over my shoulder, here's a short example that
should clarify:
$ cd /tmp
$ mkdir -p mailarchives/Y2009
$ mkdir -p mailarchives/Y2010
$ cd mailarchives/Y2009
$ touch m1 m2 m3 m4 # create empty mailboxes
$ cd
$ cd mailarchives/Y2010
$ touch m1 m2 m3 m4
$ mutt -f mailarchives/Y2009/m1
Now hit 'c' followed by <Tab> a couple of times until you see something
like the output of the 'ls' command.
Navigate to the '..' entry at the top, hit <Enter> etc..
Keep tabbing, and at one point, you should be back to your list of mail
boxes.
Further <Tab> actions toggle the list of mail boxes and the last ls-type
display.
Now you can open your Inbox, hit 't' to tag a few messages, ';' for the
tag- prompt, followed by capital 'C' telling mutt that you want to copy
these messages elsewhere and mutt will ask you where:
Copy tagged to mailbox (? for list): ...
Hit Ctrl-U to clear followed by <Tab> and navigate via the ls-like
display to ~/tmp/mailarchives/Y2009/m3 and hit <Enter>.
You will be prompted again:
Append messages to /tmp/mailarchives/Y2009/m3: [yes]/no:
Hit <Enter> to choose the default [yes] or 'n' for no.
This all sounds rather complicated, but in fact it takes considerably
longer to describe in words than actually perform.
Actually, in my experience, once you get have these keyboard actions
wired into your muscle memory, scouring the entire file system takes
seconds and makes you feel sorry for the mouse clickers :-)
All the above is a description of how I am currently set up and how I
manage to function effectively with both a flat list of mail boxes and
tree structures that emulate the nested folders of other mailers.
Note that I only use the mbox format and although I don't know how this
would translate to a maildir setup, or to remote mail via IMAP, I
wouldn't be surprised if something similarly effective and ergonomic
could be achieved in these contexts.
Not sure if that's what you were missing but I certainly didn't find it
obvious when I switched to mutt a few years ago.
Gen-Paul.
