Re: Moving to maildir folders

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Hi,

after reading hugo's mail[1], I decided to switch to maildirs (for various
reasons, including fun, ease to synchronize, testing, a.s.o).

[1] http://impressive.net/archives/fogo/[email protected]

This was rather easy to do.

1) writing a script to run mbox2maildir on all my mboxes
2) set mbox_type=Maildir into ~/.muttrc
(so that it creates maildirs and not mailboxes)
3) adding '/' to procmail rules


Just wanted to add my conclusions to :

> 2. Will MUAs recognize the maildir format?
>   Mutt[5] 1.2 can access maildir folders.

Indeed, it can access maildir folders. Still, maildir support is not as
good as mailbox support. The following are not really bugs, but can be
annoying.


* 1 : when in "open mailbox" mode, pressing "c" again will put
you in "Chdir to" mod. Whatever you do, you'll end up with an error,
most likely "not a mailbox". Anyway, why the hell did you press "c",
heh?


* 2 : default unread maildir
In a mailbox configuration, once you have read some mail in one box, it
is considered as read, and won't show up as having new mails, even if
you have left some unread mail in it. It won't show up as the default
unread mailbox, either.

In a maildir configuration, you have to read *all your new mail*
in a maildir, and if not it will always show up as the default
"next-to-be-read".

Cool behaviour would probably be somewhere between those two. Being able
to put aside some mails you want to read later, and being reminded it
once the rest has been read.

What I do is that I copy all these "I'll read this later" mails into
a special maildir (thus marking them as read). When I have time for
them I process the special directory fifo-style, and remove the mails
when done. The only drawback is that the original mail is not marked as
"replied" (r) in its actual maildir.


--
Olivier

Re: Moving to maildir folders

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Parents:

On Tue, Feb 20, 2001, Olivier Thereaux wrote:
> after reading hugo's mail[1], I decided to switch to maildirs (for various
> reasons, including fun, ease to synchronize, testing, a.s.o).

Excellent. I will have to do this at some point too, as soon as I have
figured out how to make it work with IMAP.

[..]
> Indeed, it can access maildir folders. Still, maildir support is not as
> good as mailbox support. The following are not really bugs, but can be
> annoying.
>
[..]
> * 2 : default unread maildir
> In a mailbox configuration, once you have read some mail in one box, it
> is considered as read, and won't show up as having new mails, even if
> you have left some unread mail in it. It won't show up as the default
> unread mailbox, either.
>
> In a maildir configuration, you have to read *all your new mail*
> in a maildir, and if not it will always show up as the default
> "next-to-be-read".

I have seen something like that. I have reported a bug[0] about
trashed emails, but I wanted to report this behavior too. You should
probably send another message there with your comments. Well, my
problem is that I could not leave a folder until I had read *all* the
emails in it because it would otherwise always show up in the change
folder prompt as a folder with new mail. I should try with a newer
version of Mutt.

Note that I discussed on mutt-dev new mail detection in the past. The
problem is that, even in mbox format, it doesn't work that well: Mutt
uses the folder's timestamp (which is a cheap test) to detect new
mail. The problem is that it doesn't always work, especially over NFS.
This is why I always compile Mutt with the buffy size option which
reads the folder to see if there is new mail.

> Cool behaviour would probably be somewhere between those two. Being able
> to put aside some mails you want to read later, and being reminded it
> once the rest has been read.

I think that this can be achieved with the mark_old option, although I
am not sure about it. I tried to use it, but I wasn't that happy,
although I can't remember why.

 0. http://bugs.guug.de/db/41/412.html

--
Hugo Haas <[email protected]> - http://larve.net/people/hugo/
Asleep at the switch? I wasn't asleep, I was drunk! -- Homer J. Simpson

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