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Re: Why does mutt sees Mailman mailboxes as empty?



On Sat, May 09, 2009 at 04:49:50PM +0200, M. Fioretti wrote:
> On Sat, May 09, 2009 07:02:14 AM -0700, George Davidovich wrote:
> 
> > Email address munging where 'user@xxxxxxxxxxx' is replaced with some
> > variation of 'user at example.org'
> 
> Holy cow, you're right.  I know about this practice, but had forgotten
> the downloaded mailbox would have this problem. This is what I get
> from grepping my own address from that file:
> 
> From mfioretti at nexaima.net  Sat May 17 08:23:09 2008
> From: mfioretti at nexaima.net (M. Fioretti)
> From mfioretti at nexaima.net  Sun May 25 07:23:42 2008
> From: mfioretti at nexaima.net (M. Fioretti)
> From mfioretti at nexaima.net  Sun May 25 07:56:41 2008
> From: mfioretti at nexaima.net (M. Fioretti)

Note that 'From ' and 'From:' are distinct; the space in the former is
not a typo.

> So is this (munged email addresses) what would prevent mutt from
> detecting message boundaries?

My guess is that mutt doesn't see any valid messages, let alone any
boundaries.  If you de-munged the addresses, however, each 'From '
line would be in proper format, so messages and message boundaries would
be interpreted correctly by mutt.

That's not to say you should expect that a given archive contains 
'From ' lines, or that if it does, they're in a valid format with or
without address munging.  Like I said, don't be surprised by what you
download.

> I also have no problem to put together a script to fix any text file,
> but in this case I had no idea what to look for, that's why I asked.

Personally, I'd use a text editor and visually confirm each
substitution.  You could probably get away with just fixing the 'From '
as far as mutt is concerned, but that won't help if you every need to
reply to a given message, or anything else that one normally does with
email.

As a side note, if you've got NNTP support compiled into mutt and the
mailing list you're interested in is carried by Gmane, you can skip a
lot of this nonsense by letting mutt handle everything.

-- 
George