On Fri, 16 Oct 2020 10:14:48 +1100 Cameron Simpson <cs(a)cskk.id.au> wrote:
On 15Oct2020 11:06, Ranjan Maitra <maitra(a)email.com> wrote:
>Thanks, yes, I used to use mbox long ago, when I did not understand things clearly,
and I used pine then, but I moved to mh with the move to sylpheed. An added benefit is in
backups. I have never lost any mail on mh so far, but I wonder if I am simply tempting
fate by not moving to Maildir (I do not completely understand the issues).
Mostly the races.
To add, remove or flag in MH probably requires a locking mechanism while
updating the message number lists (and correspondingly, allocating new
message numbers). You also don't know an arriving message is complete unless
it isn't numbered yet; I imagine an MH insert goes
save-completely-to-tempfile, allocate-number, rename-tempfile-to-number,
update-number-lists. A lock would need to be held over the last three
steps.
This may be a stupid question, but does this problem still happen if I use fetchmail to
pull mail and store messages in files via procmail?. In my experience, messages have been
given unique numbers in their respective folders. (Of course, my MH is really not MH, but
rather sylpheed-mh, since they do not update the .mh_sequences but use .sylpheed_mark.
Maildir is race free. Messages get unqiue filenames (composed of various
sufficently unique values combined), are created in the "tmp" subdir,
and renamed into the "new" subdir. Read messages are renamed from
"new"
to "cur". No shared number lists, no locks. You only look for messages
in "new" and "cur".
Thanks very much for this. I have found a tool that can convert mh to mailbox:
https://github.com/vuntz/mh2maildir/blob/master/mh2maildir
It seems to work, but can not handle a second level of subfolders: brings them all out as
individual folders at the first level, so Ihave to fix that. Also, I don't like the
new folder names, seem too unnecessary for me. (I was expecting to the old MH folder names
inside my Maildir.) Also, the mails get stored as something like:
1602799622.116065_21187.hostname:2, not sure if this is the recommended way that files are
stored in the Maildir format. I was expecting to have something that I could have control
over.
I have to look into this some more. I am not sure if this is the standard way to store
Maildir format messages.
One aspect of MH that I have liked is that I pull mail on two machines (using fetchmail
via a POP server) and they are assigned the same filenames (numbers). Then, if I use rsync
with delete, I can delete the corresponding message in the remote machine if I have
deleted it on my local machine. It has worked like a charm over the past 15 years (I would
say).
>Separately, I am still trying to figure out if there are still
major advantages to using mutt vs. neomutt.
My advice would be: start with mainline mutt (because I know the maintenance
situation is active) and consider neomutt if there's some specific missing
feature you want (if neomutt has it, of course). But ask on the mutt-users
list about features; some things are available and/or doable without always
being immediately obvious.
You can also try both - mutt, hmm missing feature, neomutt. You may need
to maintain distinct config files for each, but they can share mail folders.
Also, config files can source other config files, so you might have:
.muttrc-common-config
.muttrc
.muttrc-neomutt
with the last 2 both sourcing .muttrc-common-config and then adding
a few specific tweaks.
Thanks, I think that I am also coming round to the view that I should stick to mutt. The
listed neomutt features are:
https://neomutt.org/feature. I do not know what is not also
in mutt. But in any case, I probably won't know the difference. (I don't
completely understand all the features.)
I want to read my e-mail locally. Basically, run fetchmail or mbsync in the background to
get mail and store in local folders at intervals, then have mutt read them, etc. I like
storing my e-mail locally so that I can get to it offline. Which is one of the reasons I
have never liked all these web-based mailers that almost all my friends and colleagues
(and especially those on gmail) seems to like nowadays.
Thanks again!
Ranjan