This is a usage scenario which largely doesn't involve mutt directly, though it does impact heavily on its use and usability.
TL;DR: how best to deal with receive/send remotely, store locally, via rsync, and finding an effective way to send from local machine via remote. Consider the following configuration: - Remote Linux shell account on system with full mail access. - Local laptop/desktop with intermittant network connectivity. The classic solution is to ssh to the remote host and use it for all mail transfer. This works reasonably well most of the time but has the pitfalls of: 1: When either local or remote network conjestion is high, the interaction is laggy. 2: Dealing with attachments means saving them to disk on the remote system, transferring them locally, and possibly reversing the process when local files must be emailed. 3: There's a non-minimal storage overhead imposed on the remote system. Astute observers may note that the email address used to send this mal is hosted through gmail -- the issue exists with another account (gmail + offlineimap + mutt FTW, BTW). I can rsync the remote mutt Inbox maildir locally reasonably easily. Done. The first hitch is keeping local/remote folders in sync (this is possible through rsync, though I need to look into how best to do this such that the last change (whether it's local or remote) is preserved. Archiving mail outside the rsync tree should avoid having to deal with large/wholesale changes to mail volume (and reduce remote storage requirements). The second hitch is coming up with a good way to have local mail submitted to the remote host when sending. Local and remote MTAs are both exim4. I'm thinking some magick with SSH (ssh-agent is running) or such. Assistance/suggestions greatly appreciated. -- Dr. Ed Morbius, Chief Scientist / | Robot Wrangler / Staff Psychologist | When you seek unlimited power Krell Power Systems Unlimited | Go to Krell!
