Hi Thaddeus,
On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 11:37:43AM -0400, Thaddeus Morgan wrote:
After 16 years of using pine, I've decided to make the switch to mutt.
Welcome!
1) What is the best method of converting a large number of mbox folder
into Maildir folders? I've read that mutt's -f and -e options are
suitable for doing this. Is there a best practice I should follow?
While Mutt can do this conversion, if you have a large number of mailboxes to
convert, you'd be well advised to look into one of the various scripts that
can do this function (use your favorite search engine and look for "convert
mbox to maildir").
FWIW, mbox makes a fine archive folder format. If some of these mailboxes are
not in active use, it may not make sense to convert them all to maildir.
Maildir is much better for active mailboxes due to less concern about locking,
and you can use the header_cache support to speed up opening the mailbox.
If you want to do the conversion inside Mutt, you just need to make sure you
default mailbox format for new folders is set:
set mbox_type=maildir
You can either put this in your ~/.muttrc, or via the command line:
mutt -e 'set mbox_type=maildir' -f ...
Next step is to tag all the messages and copy them to a non-existant folder:
press control-T
type ~A followed by RETURN
press ; followed by C
enter the name of the destination folder and press RETURN
Mutt will create the new mailbox use the value of $mbox_type to determine
which format to use.
2) What is the best way to store local copies of all messages? I'd
like to read, sort, and compose responses to my mail while offline and
I'd like to have a local copy of all my mail in case something goes
horribly wrong with the server and its backups. I've read that
fetchmail and offlineimap can accomplish this. Can mutt do this on its
own? Again, is there a best practice to follow?
I believe offlineimap is what most people tend to use for offline IMAP
browsing.
For message sending, you have your choice of either postponing messages inside
of Mutt, and then recalling them later when you have Internet connectivity, or
you can run a full-fledged MTA on your local machine that will send the
messages.
me
