Re: [Nmh-workers] Hybrid approach

[Peter Davis]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 09:36:04PM +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> Now it is dawning upon me that I could use Claws Mail most of the
> time, for my day-to-day needs, and nmh/mailutils for my special
> needs.
> It would be a hybrid approach, in which the same messages/folders
> are used by two different systems: Claws Mail and nmh/mailutils.
> 
> Has anyone tried anything like this yet? Could I run into some
> incompatibilities?
> 
> Above all, do you think that this approach makes sense?

Over the years, I've used *many* different email tools. Even now I have three 
different repositories (GMail, an IMAP server and my local MH directory tree) 
and even more clients. On the MH side, I typically use mutt for more day-to-day 
reading, replying, filing, etc. I use fetchmail and procmail to collect the 
mail into folders. I have fetchmail using the MH rcvstore program, so the MH 
tree is always correct. 

Mutt is great. I used Sylpheed-Claws in the past, and would be game to try it 
again, but I don't want to have to build my own Mac version. Life's too short. 
(BTW, I do think SC used whatever MH was installed on the system, but I'm not 
completely sure. I recently tried a Windows version of Claws mail on a Windows 
VM running on my Mac, but I could not find a way to get it to use my existing 
MH tree. I insisted on creating a new one.)

Meanwhile, I can do everything I want with mutt, and *very* quickly. For some 
things, I have a macro defined to pipe a message to a Perl script that 
automatically processes the message. If I want to see an HTML message, I have 
macros to pipe it through MHonArc (Thanks, Earl!) or to pipe just the html part 
directly to a browser.

And, of course, I can use the MH commands directly or from scripts. I have one 
mutt macro that pipes a message to a Perl script which then composes and sends 
a new message to an address that was contained in the original email. Believe 
it or not, I use this a lot!

I briefly considered Gnu Mailutils, but I never found an answer to my main 
question: Can you use MH-compatible commands on a Maildir repository? Maildir 
is supposed to be somewhat more robust than MH format, but it also doesn't 
support nested folders, except by an embarrasingly (I would think) bad kludge. 
Meanwhile, I've had zero problems with my old and large MH tree, so I'm not 
worried about it.

I guess what I'm trying to say is yes, it makes sense.

-pd


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Peter Davis
The Tech Curmudgeon
www.techcurmudgeon.com