Slashdot Mirror
Mutt Hits 1.0
Albert Schueller writes "After years of alpha and beta, everybody's favorite mail client,
MUTT, has an official 1.0 release. They've also got news about the release."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Sorry for flaming.
But there is this thing called a learning curve. Having the mouse available eases the learning curve but eventually the user would figure out the key bindings. So eventually the user would stop or almost stop using the mouse.
You should see me in computer class. I use the keyboard all the time on Excel spreadsheets and finish the spreadsheets before everyone else virtually everytime. You can tell a person's experience with the computer, even on a Windows or Mac machine, by how often they reach for the mouse. This is that learning thing.
***Beginning*of*Signiture***
Linux? That's GNU/Linux to you mister!
Really? Why don't you get off your elitist high-horse and ask yourself how mouse support is a bad thing.
Oh no! The program is easier without taking away my flexibility! Easier! Oh, the horror!
I am more in the opinion that most of the clueless are the people who *use* GNU/Linux.
***Beginning*of*Signiture***
Linux? That's GNU/Linux to you mister!
Mutt also uses SIGWINCH and resize_term(), which are not found in all systems/curses implementations. I don't know if you've heard of it, but there's a useful little utility called autoconf. It's used by mutt; you might want to read up on it.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
GPG support's worked for me for quite a while, .muttrc:
add lines like these to your
# GPG settings
set pgp_default_version=gpg
set pgp_gpg=/home/yarn/bin/gpg
This works with Mutt 0.95.3i (1999-02-12)
(packaged with debian)
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
..can you even set up filters in PINE? PINE and PICO are nice and all, but they're also pretty vanilla (anyone who is wondering why I included a text editor in this statement apparently doesn't know where either are developed). Good for the newbies (or uncaring), but not very flexible. Especially not for the serious text editor or email fanatic. ;)
No, this is not intended as a flame, I'm geniunely curious.
~ Kish
Mutt was not developed by ESR, you are thinking of fetchmail. It was developed by Michael Elkins, who is the one who said "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.", not ESR.
No probs at all .. add something like this to your .muttrc
set pgp_gpg="/usr/bin/gpg"
set pgp_default_version="gpg"
set pgp_receive_version="default"
set pgp_key_version="default"
set pgp_send_version="default"
I'm on mutt 1.0pre4 and gpg 1.0, and it works flawlessly.
In addition to what the other posters have said here about GnuPG support in mutt, keep in mind that you can use GnuPG with just about any PGP 2.6-capable program by using the PGP wrapper, pgpgpg.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
Mutt stores its mail folders as single mbox files. Any file (/var/spool/mail/bob, ~/mbox, ~/Mail/foo) can be opened this way; as a convenience, Mutt allows you to refer to a file in ~/Mail by '='. So ~/Mail/foo is =foo. Mutt also has a concept of 'mailboxes'; these are mail folders to which mail can be delivered (by the local MTA, procmail, whatever). You can list these with the 'mailboxes' command in ~/.muttrc.
To switch which mailbox you're viewing, type 'c'. mutt will default to switching to the next mailbox with new mail, but you can type anything. Tab completion also works, and if you hit 'tab' twice it will move to a file browser. 'tab' in the file browser shows an overview of your defined mailboxes, with information about which ones have new mail.
I suggest you read the Mutt manual before asking any more questions, since it explains everything that I just said.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Personally, I think you're trying to do the wrong thing. Mail clients shouldn't be in the business of filtering mail; procmail works quite nicely for this and doesn't require you to manually move the mail (even if you just have to type 's' it's a pain when you get >100 messages a day)
.*foo@bar.org with some other regexp)
Most lists can be procmailed with something like:
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
MAILDIR=$HOME/Mail
DEFAULT=/var/spool/mail/bob
LOGFILE=$HOME/Mail/procmail.log
:0:
* X-MailingList:.*foo@bar.org
foo
(you may have to replace X-MailingList with some other header and
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Is this possible?
:)
Yes. Use fetchmail. Mailreaders aren't in the business of downloading mail; if they are it's a bug
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
The post above may be a troll, but there's a grain of truth in it. Much as I like Linux I haven't found any email program that can meet my needs as well as MS Outlook. If you've been using a Unix mail client for years it won't bother you, but going from Outlook to a Unix text mode client feels like having my hands tied behind my back.
Things that are trivially easy in Outlook require reading lots of documentation in Unix. I have over 400MB of email in Outlook. It's organized in a multi-level tree of mail folders that are displayed on screen. I have icons in the Outlook bar that take me to frequently used folders with a single click. Clicking on a column heading in the message list sorts by that column. When I open a message it opens in a new window which I can leave open while I read other email. I do this all the time when I'm not ready to deal with a message right away.
Outlooks filters are certainly easier to use that procmail's, but neither are any use if there isn't some kind of text matching that can identify mail. I work on many projects simultaneously and have at least 50 mail folders and growing. I work with the same people on different projects so I can filter on sender and the project isn't necessarily in the subject line. With Outlook I can cntrl-click on many different messages and drag them to a folder.
This is just a short list of the things that are easy and obvious in Outlook. Certainly I could spend my time reading documentation for Mutt and Fetchmail and Procmail and Sendmail and figure out work arounds for most of the things Outlook does "out of the box", but I just don't have the time.
I tried using Mutt with GnuPG but it does not work!
A common problem is that you use an older version of Mutt with a new version of gnupg. Recent version of gnupg (0.9.8 and up) don't have the gpgm helper program any more which Mutt uses to access the keyring. Not only that, the gnupg installation routine will also remove gpgm from previous versions. The quick fix is to symlink gpg to gpgm.
--
Okay, I got Linux installed. So where's the free beer everyone keeps talking about??
Mutt seems to me to have the nicest of the text interfaces; it is somewhat unfortunate that it doesn't have huge support for the multiplicity of folders that a MH user grows to. (I've got 350 mail folders and 179MB of archived email, for instance.) For managing that, the user interface of EXMH combined with a variety of shell scripts are pretty much necessary.
Mutt is still the nicest way of reading mail on a console...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
MH-E doesn't provide anything substantially better for transferring messages from folder to folder than the shell bindings you can get for zsh. EXMH provides a potent way of doing this that I've not seen in any other system; quite a lot better than the XMH front end.
Back to the point of the thread, Mutt and Slrn strongly parallel one another; they have highly similar user interfaces which partially comes from using the same text UI library, SLANG, which happens also to buy them a 'full' programming language that, not unlike with Elisp, allows "no end" to the customization. It's definitely different from Elisp, but that does not deny that these systems are quite extensible.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.