Re: aliasing mailing lists

[cga2000 <cga2000@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 12:07:40PM EDT, David Woodfall wrote:
> On (14:58 18/05/06), David Woodfall <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> put forth the 
> proposition:
> > On (03:25 18/05/06), cga2000 <cga2000@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> put forth the 
> > proposition:
        
[..]
> 
> This is more complete I think;
> 
> ls -1 ~/mail/lists | grep @ |awk -F@ '{print "alias" " " $1 " " "<" $1 "@" $2 
> ">"}' > ~/.mutt/lists
> ls -1 ~/mail/lists | awk '{print "mailboxes +lists/" $1}' >> ~/.mutt/lists
> ls -1 ~/mail/lists | awk '{print "subscribe " $1}' >> ~/.mutt/lists
> 
subscribe `cd ~/mail/lists; ls`
mailboxes `for file in $(ls ~/mail/lists); do echo -n "+lists/$file "; done`

.. some trial & error in the shell before I got it to work.

I think it's the better solution because it directly adds the contents
of my .mutt/lists directory to the list of subscribed mailing lists and
to the menu.
> 
> > 
> > And in my binds file:
> > 
> > macro   generic \ca     "!~/scripts/listalias\n:source ~/.mutt/lists\n"
> > 
> > Now the mailboxes commands are sourced from my lists file too. So all I do 
> > is
> > keep .procmailrc updated with new list rules and hit ^a in mutt to auto 
> > update
> > the aliases and mailboxes.

Not sure doing it on the fly is the right approach any more, though.
Maybe this should be done by invoking a script from the .muttrc to
re-create the alias file prior to sourcing it. 

Also keep in mind that mailboxes "come and go" .. ie. if you delete all
the messages in a given mailing list.. the corresponding mailbox
vanishes.. and will be recreated (in my setyp) when new messages for
this list are downloaded. The way I currently do it there's an outside
chance something will be out of sync once in a while. My way to address
this is that I do not delete the original message from the list
"Welcome to the ... mailing list.. etc.".. 

So, if you really want something a little more robust you would probably
need to keep track of what lists you are subscribed to outside of mutt,
adding an entry when you subscribe to a mailing list and deleting it
when you unsubscribe.. And use this "list of subscribed lists" to
generate the targets of your .muttrc commands (subscribe/mailboxes) as
well as your alias file. 

Unfortunately I've only been using mutt for a few weeks and I don't
know enough about its capabilities to decide how best to go about
setting up such a - hopefully - more robust system.

Thanks,

cga