Moving a non-trivial mail setup to mutt
Hello,
for the umptieth time I'm trying to give mutt a spin. I've heard it
recommended many times, and I'd like to try it out. After getting
dissatisfied with pine I've come a long way to Claws-Mail via Opera
and Thunderbird. I'm happy with Claws except that I'm not happy with
GUI apps in general.
So, let's try out mutt. However, there doesn't seem so be a "just try
it out". There is a steep learning curve to be mastered first.
For instance, after half a day of tearing out my hair and having
so many mutt webpages open that I the tabs on the top of my
browser started getting blurriy, I managed to connect to my IMAP
server like this:
set spoolfile=imap://email.server.org/INBOX
Great. Now I can see my inbox. And nothing else. How can I see my
other folders on that server? 'c ?' doesn't show anything.
Speaking of folders. Mutt looks into the same folder hierarchy as my
current sylpheed-claws setup. But it only shows me top-level
folders. When I enter a folder it doesn't show me any subfolders.
Does mutt not support nested folders? Then I can't use it.
I've also managed to set up fetchmail, which fetches mail from
several POP3 accounts into one repository where I can access it if
and only if I comment out the above line. To sort out those mails I
guess I'll have to feed them through procmail, but where will they
end up then, and how will mutt check for new mails and tell me about
it? Is there some kind of overview of folders that can receive mail?
How can I have "multiple identites"? Sometimes I'm sending mail
under my private address, sometimes as an employee of my company. How
can this be managed by mutt? When I reply to mail, can mutt
automatically use the address under which I received that mail as the
sender identity?
Next thing. The address book. There seems to be an external program
called "abook" that adds some rudimentary address book functionality.
But I work on largish projects that frequently require me to set up
ad-hoc lists of eight or more people which I can send mail to by
typing a single "nick name". I also need to be able to quickly add
addresses to those lists by some selection method (like Pine's "List
mode").
Judging from its nerdy user base I had hoped (and am still hoping)
that mutt was some kind of power-user MUA, but especially the
apparent lack of advanced address management might turn out to be a
deal breaker.
I hope someone can clue me in. I have a repository for software that
I will never get my head around. Emacs has been in there after
invoking it once and not being able to quit it except by killing it
from another console. Vi after one week during which I forced
myself to use nothing but vi. Mutt seems so be ready to join. Maybe
I'm just not the geek I'd like to be.
In short, my requirements are:
- Multiple accounts (both local and remote)
- Multiple identites
- Folders with subfolders
- Powerful address management
Does mutt cutt it?
--D.