[Nmh-workers] Improving reading mime email.

[Jon Steinhart]

> Jon Steinhart <address@hidden> wrote:
> >     3.  Improve the reading end of mime mail.  I've brought this issue up
> >         before and have ideas on how to do this.
> 
> Such as?  (e.g. I'm sure I could work out how to make 'scan' show real
> text instead of: "=?ISO-2202-JP?Q?=82l=82 ..." in subject lines if I
> RTFM'd, but shouldn't it be a default?)

This is something on which I've posted some musings in the past.  What I'd
like to be able to do (probably by turning on some new option) is to get a
scan listing that looks something like this:

3022+  05/17 Josh Bressers      nmh-workders mailing list slowness<<Now that
3026   05/17 Saul Wold          Resume Reveiw Request<<This is a multi-part 
3026.1       text/plain
3026.2       text/plain         saul_200505.txt
3035   05/18 John Gilmore       Annie and I will definitely be gone during J
3037   05/18 Geoffrey Squier S  OCF Photo Group 1: People in Red<<--========
3037.1       text/html
3037.2       image/jpeg         RedWoman.jpg
3037.3       text/html

I would then like to be able to do stuff like:

        show 3037.2             show a particular part of a mime message

        show -next -mime        show the next part of a mime message or
                                the next message if on the last part

        show -prev -mime        same for previous message

        forw 3037.2             forward a part of a message without having
                                to first save it in a file

This is primarily a user interface issue to me.  As many of us agree, one
of mh's strong suits is that each message is a file.  But, mime sort of
breaks that by having multiple messages in a file and requiring users to
go through all sorts of contortions to handle message parts.
 
> Probably my biggest mh challenge at present is finding messages, i.e.
> did I file that in this folder or that one?  This is probably the most
> likely thing to move me from mh to something like Thunderbird (with
> inbuilt search).  I currently grep -R to find such messages, I have
> played with glimpse in the past, I suspect mh's annotate function would
> help with this (and with David Allen's GTD organising) but I haven't
> found a solution that is both easy and quick yet.

I suppose that I need to come up with an official release for the project
that I've been working on.  You may notice a somewhat feature in the nmh
code to handle "external hooks".  This allows external programs to be
invoked when messages are inc'd, rmm'd, and refiled.  Part of my project,
grokmail, builds a real database from your mail messages.  So you can do
stuff like

% gscan foo bar
 442  12/07 chad               Re: Anyone home?<<First off, let me say that I d
 446  12/07 Jon Steinhart      foo<<bar >>
2406  12/06 Paul Fox           [Nmh-workers] BUG: mhshow dumps core with bad co
2641  02/17 Rob Savoye         Re: php question<<Jon Steinhart wrote: > http://

Of course, the real magic of grokmail is that you can train it by ranking 
messages
on a scale of 1-10 and then scan for interesting messages.

Jon