On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 07:22:24PM +0100, Jonas Petong wrote: > Today I accidentally copied my mails into the same folder where they had been > stored before (evil keybinding!!!) and now I'm faced with about a 1000 copies > within my inbox. Since those duplicates do not have a unique mail-id, it's > hopeless to filter them with mutts integrated duplicate limiting pattern. > Command '<limit>~=' has no effect in my case and deleting them by hand > will take me hours! > > I know this question has been (unsuccessfully) asked before. Anyhow is there > is > a way to tag every other mail (literally every nth mail of my inbox-folder) > and > afterwards delete them? I know something about linux-scripting but > unfortunately > I have no clue where to start with and even which script-language to use. > > This close-to-topic approach with 'fdupes' has been released some time ago > (http://consolematt.wordpress.com/tag/fdupes/) but in my view it seems way to > complicated. As I could recognize from mutts mailing archive, I'm not the only > one who has had trouble with it. Therefore I appreciate any hint which drives > me > into the right direction and helps me solving this. > > Running Mutt 1.5.21 under Ubuntu Gnome 13.10. (Linux 3.11.0-13-generic). > I don't have a script, but I usually view lists without threading, using date/time sent in sender's timezone (%d) - I'm sure that using the local time zone (%D) probably works the same way. On occasion I've had to change which of my upstreams was subscribed to heavy-traffic lists such as lkml, and at other times I've occasionally had mails appearing twice after upstream problems. When needed, it's just a case of looking at the index and deleting every other mail. Tedious, but achievable - particularly for only 1000 mails - I've done more than that in the past ;-)
And after marking a batch to be deleted, I can look at which are marked (just in case I had finger trouble) and specify the message number to go to and undelete. I believe the order in which I see mails is governed by index_format [ I haven't looked at this stuff in ages - why break what works for me ]. Mine is: set index_format="%4C %Z %{%b %d} %-15.15n (%?l?%4l&%4c?) %s" If you aren't a reckless person, turn off incoming mail and backup the directory or mbox before you try *any* solution. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, dieses Mal als Farce