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Re: Moving a non-trivial mail setup to mutt



On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 07:50:10AM -0500, Dan H wrote:
> When I start mutt, it shows me the stuff in the local spool. As soon
> as I do some folder-oriented stuff it dives into the IMAP server, but
> how can I now access my local hierarchy under ~/Mail?
> 
> In principle I'd like to keep all locally (POP3) receiced mail in the
> ~/Mail hierarchy and the other stuff on the IMAP server.

When I moved my work email from our horrible MS Exchange implementation
to use mutt, I made a few concessions with regard to this.

Things become substantially easier if you just download all the mail to
your spool.  This works for me because I read my mail on a box that I
have remote ssh access to.  I could even setup IMAP to read from my
local spool there if I needed to use IMAP elsewhere for some reason.

There's a number of benefits to fetching from the IMAP server:

1) Unified filtering: all my mail filters are implemented in one
procmail recipie file, filtered at delivery time.  I never have to wait
on imapfilter (or similar) to filter remote mailboxes.

2) SpamAssassin: SA works so much better than our server's integrated
spam filter, especially when I can train my own Bayesian database and
tune rule scores for my mail.

3) No switching between remote and local mail: mutt reads everything out
of my local spool.  Easier to navigate with mutt, and faster anyway.

4) Address book usage becomes searching LDAP: this is a benefit for us
because Microsoft's global catalog performs substantially worse via
Outlook than LDAP.  I have no clue why.  "mutt-ldap.pl" by Andreas
Plesner Jacobsen makes it very easy to query LDAP for addresses.  It's
simple to understand and easy to customize with just a little bit of
perl.

Ross

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