same mutt email but revised

[Hal Burgiss]

On Sat, Jul 05, 2008 at 02:17:43AM -0500, Christopher Lemire wrote:
> 
> 1. I do not always remember the exact email address of someone I want to
> send to, so I have been using tab completion in the gmail web
> interface. That allows me to do several things. If I remember or guess
> the first part of and email, I can get a list of emails shown below
> the address bar that match what I have typed and choose the correct
> one. When I've been opening up Mutt to send a new email, the to: field
> only contains the address if it's a reply, and I tried to use that for
> the Mutt mailing list, but ended up getting the email of the person
> who sent the email to the group rather than the groups email. What's
> the solution to this? 

What key do you hit to 'reply'? You can set up mailing lists in
.muttrc, then use 'L' to reply to the list. (Also, 'g' is handy for
replying to 'all' and there is a me_too setting so you don't get
copied on 'all').


> Do I need to tediously memorize all email addresses? Is there some
> type of address book in Mutt that I can browse and then point to the
> one that I want to send an email to. What works for you experienced
> Mutt users.

~/.mail_aliases is the default. You probably have to tell mutt about
this in .muttrc. When I start a new mail, I get a 'To:' prompt first
in the terminal, then type a partial email address and then hit 'Tab',
which gives me a scrollable list of matches. There is a muttrc setting
for this as well. There is a similar setting for cc if you do a lot of
cc'd mail.

> Just wondering if it is possible to import my gmail contact list
> into Mutt. I can export it from Gmail into two formats, one of which
> could possibly work with Mutt, or if I have to, I'll do it by hand.

The question is does gmail export the list? Then it becomes a matter
of scripting. Probably somebody has done it, so googling might work.
The format of .mail_aliases is simple:

  nickname Real Name <realname at somewhere.com>

The first space is the delimiter.


> 
> 2. It appeared that Mutt was automatically
> deleting emails after I had read them. This scared me. 

This must be a setting in your muttrc (or lack of one), because in 10
years of using mutt, I've not had this happen. By default, my mail is
saved in the current mailbox. There is 'save-hook' feature that uses
regular expression if you want mails automatically saved somewhere
else.

> Is there anything else I should know or looks like I'm missing? 

Probably, there's a world of flexibility there. 

BTW, any server that I have a mailbox on, I set it up where I can
remotely access it remotely. So at work, I ssh/mutt my home
mail, or vice versa. I control the firewalls in both places so its
easy that way. If I am traveling and don't feel like leaving stuff wide
open, I use procmail to forward all mail to gmail (I don't use gmail on
a regular basis because its too freakin slow viz a viz mutt and I can't
use vim with my customized vimrc on gmail/firefox and that is hugely
limiting for me. I use vim as both the mutt pager and composer because it
is infinitely, or seemingly so, configurable). I know you probably
don't need this aspect, but thought I would mention it since combining
procmail with mutt can be greatly helpful in some situations.

-- 
Hal