On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 02:34:43PM -0600, Puneet Kishor wrote: > There is much that I have to do to really get comfortable with mutt, but > I think I am making slow but steady progress. One feature that really > bothers me because of its absence is a unified mailbox.
There isn't really any way to do this, except -- as others have said already -- to get all your mail somehow delivered to the same folder. There are many ways to accomplish this... If you have shell access to the server (and it's Unix-like), a .forward file will allow you to redirect all your mail elsewhere. The fetchmail program can be configured to fetch mail from numerous sources and store it all in one folder (this could be on an IMAP server... there isn't any technical reason this needs to be delivered to your desktop). This idea seems somewhat counter to the philosophy of Mutt, which one might summarize as "a place for everything, and everything in its place." Most people I have encountered who use Mutt and enjoy it specifically do not want a unified inbox, myself certainly included. I think it's fair to say that Mutt was not designed with this paradigm in mind... The easiest way to deal with multiple accounts with mutt is to deliver mail from those accounts into specific folders, and use folder hooks to set variables associated with the respective accounts upon entering the folder. Note that I said "easiest" -- it is in no way the only way to do that. > As is, with mutt, I am constantly flipping between one account to > another, and even though I have mapped the F1 and F2 keys to the > inboxes for the two accounts, it is a pain in the derierre. > Everytime mutt has to scan through the cache and rebuild the index > view. This is only a pain if you're keeping thousands of messages in your inbox (maybe hundreds with IMAP). You certainly can do that, but in many ways it would be more efficient to archive read mail into another folder, relegating your inbox for onlyl what that name implies: incoming items. You can, of course, run multiple copies of Mutt, each in a different folder. > So, since nothing is impossible in mutt, how can I get a unified > inbox for my two accounts? Many things are impossible in Mutt, and many other things are possible but hard or painful. In some cases, the folks on the list have struggled with the same problems you are encountering and can help provide solutions. But if you're committed to the speed and power of Mutt, yet can't find a solution to make a particular aspect of Mutt behave the way you want, it may sometimes be more fruitful to consider changing the way you think about and handle your mail. Mutt is fast and powerful, but it is definitely not for everyone. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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