Oops - mail read question

[Matthew Hawkins]

Paul Bryan (pa_bryan at yahoo.co.uk) wrote:
> I found Mutt to be pretty good in most things except the ease with which a GUI
> lets you swap between folders and the like. The console is great for many
> things but sometimes a GUI really adds a lot in terms of usability.

Macros can be useful.  I was briefly in the state of having 3 mailboxes
- one at work (imap4+ssl), one at home (imap4) and local (Maildir) which
was system mail plus fetchmail from ISP.  I setup my muttrc so that
\W, \H and \L would set folder/spoolfile/signature and also reset and
source all the hooks appropriately.

Switching between multiple folders on each server is a different matter;
I do have further macros to switch between my more frequently accessed
folders, and the tab completion helps too, but (especially for a small
number of boxes) GUI's do have an advantage there.  Not so for a large
number of boxes though; I've noticed that most will scan each folder and
if you have a deeply nested tree it can get nasty, not to mention
scrollbars once the tree is bigger than the GUI allows that frame to be.
Once "point and click" becomes "point and click and point and scroll and
wait and point and click and scroll and ..." the advantage is lost.

Happy to demo the mutt setup to anyone who's interested.

Back to watching the housemate swear at the Xbox (which has a nice
enough Rally game to tempt me to support criminal organisations with
financial donations)...

-- 
Matt