On Mon, Dec 08, 2014 at 03:19:55PM +0000, Chris Green wrote: > I have been using mutt for many, many years with a local (Unix style) > mail spool. Mail is delivered to my system by SMTP (postfix locally). > > At the moment to access my mail remotely I ssh into the server and run > mutt.
I suspect many people do this. I do this. > This works well in general but there are some disadvantages, in > particular the 'v' command to access and view HTML, PDF and other > graphical attachments doesn't work because, of course, there's no GUI > access to the machine where I'm reading the mail. Do you not have X-forwarding set or is there some other problem? I have a shell account that doesn't allow X forwarding so maybe you're in a situation like that. If it's your box it might be worth changing one line in the sshd config. > It's also a bit annoying simply saving attachments and then realising > they're on the remote machine. scp or rsync the file to your local box? Presumably you are reading mail from a remote box for other reasons that are beneficial, or maybe you should just run it locally. > So, I'm wondering if using IMAP would make my life easier. I would > run Dovecot I expect. If I do this do things become more transparent > to a remote mutt? I don't see how IMAP helps. What exactly is the difference in terms of how you read mail and where the apps run as opposed to POP? The only thing IMAP does it make you rely on a remote mail server. I never use IMAP unless they don't serve POP. I know one mail provider that doesn't honor POP delete requests so to avoid leaving 100,000 emails on their server that I can't delete I use IMAP with them. Everywhere else, POP. I'd rather rely on my own email storage. > E.g. if I want to view an HTML E-Mail in Firefox (default browser) > instead of within mutt (using lynx) can I just do 'v' followed by > selecting the HTML attachment as I would when running mutt locally on > the machine where mail is hosted? Maybe. I don't see why not. Presumably if an X app starts and you have forwarding set it should just work. Personally any HTML mail I can't read in mutt gets binned. If I get documents like PDFs I just save them on /tmp on the remote box and then use a PDF reader over X. /jl -- ASCII ribbon campaign ( ) Powered by Lemote Fuloong against HTML e-mail X Loongson MIPS and OpenBSD and proprietary / \ http://www.mutt.org attachments / \ Code Blue or Go Home! Encrypted email preferred PGP Key 2048R/DA65BC04
