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<div style="font-family:sans-serif"><div style="white-space:pre-wrap"><div dir="auto">Hi, all,
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</div><div dir="auto">I'm moving from nmh and mh-e to MailMate, and I think I'm finally getting a handle on things (in particular, I now have smart mailboxes that give me views of subsets of my mail similar to what I had (and better) while still allowing me to sort messages into separate mailboxes with procmail).
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</div><div dir="auto">There are a few things that I think would be really useful that MailMate doesn't currently support (or that it supports but I haven't found yet).
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</div><div dir="auto">First, nmh and mh-e have some nice features that I haven't seen elsewhere that I think are really handy. (Enough so that lack of them has stopped me from moving away from nmh for many years.)
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</div><div dir="auto">* nmh has a cool way of handling to to/from fields when you're looking at lists of messages. Instead of showing them as separate columns, it has one column that shows you who a message is from _unless the message is from you_, in which case it shows who you sent the message to.
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</div><div dir="auto"> The `scan(1)` format code for that is
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</div><div dir="auto"> %<(mymbox{from})%<{to}To:%14(friendly{to})%>%>
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</div><div dir="auto"> and gives you something like
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</div><div dir="auto"> % scan
</div><div dir="auto"> 1 mary@hahvahd.edu rcvtty -- how do I use it?<<I've been
</div><div dir="auto"> 2 Al Bok Query about "repl -query"<<I have a q
</div><div dir="auto"> 3 "Wilbur, Orville" X Terminal Presentation/Demonstration
</div><div dir="auto"> 4 To:"Wilbur, Orvil Re: X Terminal Presentation/Demonstra
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</div><div dir="auto"> (from <a href="http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/mh/morsca.html#sca" style="color:#3983C4">http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/mh/morsca.html#sca</a>; format string definitions at <a href="http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/mh/mhstr.html" style="color:#3983C4">http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/mh/mhstr.html</a>).
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</div><div dir="auto"> Thus one address field can do the work of both the To and From fields.
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</div><div dir="auto">* nmh also allows you to define arbitrary "aliases" for sending mail; allowing you to use whatever name you choose for a recipient (they see the defined value, not the alias), set up your own mailing lists, and so on. Thus I could send to "andy" instead of having to type out "Andre" and look through possible completions. Being able to see the completions is great, of course, but if you send mail to people all the time it's nice to be able to use your own alias for them. (As a bonus, you also get to choose a canonical address for them, instead of having to pick from multiple addresses they might have used to mail you.)
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</div><div dir="auto">In the "not inspired by nmh features" category, I found that it took me quite a while to figure out how some of the filters worked, in part because there are tons of variables and figuring out what they were for any given message involved a lot of trial and error. Is there any way of showing a "debug panel" that gives you the values of all the variables for a particular message?
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</div><div dir="auto">Related to that, it would be nice to have better documentation for the mailbox name format options for submailboxes—I did find some mailing list messages covering these, but it would be easier if they were in the actual documentation.
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</div><div dir="auto">Finally (!), earlier today, I had to send out a bunch of messages that were basically the same except for a URL and the To address. I tried saving a message draft and then editing the draft message, but the message went away when I sent the message (as I'd kind of expected). I ended up copying one of the messages I'd sent to a new IMAP folder, then editing the message file on the server to remove the extra material. That seems to work—I can now go to that folder, select a message, and choose Edit as New Message, but it would be easier if you could deliberately save a message as boilerplate without having to edit it on the server. (One of the issues I found was that when editing the message, it appeared to have my signature as expected, but when I sent the message, MailMate added another copy of the signature on the end. So I edited the saved message and removed the signature bits from it.)
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</div><div dir="auto">Thanks for creating a mail client that almost makes me happy about dealing with IMAP mail! It's better than mh-e for almost all the things I have to do in almost every way, but just a couple of changes would make it even better for what I do!
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<table style="border: none;">
<tr><td>Claire Connelly</td><td style="text-align: left;"><code>cmc@math.hmc.edu</code></td></tr>
<tr><td>System Administrator</td><td style="text-align: left;">(909) 621-8754</td></tr>
<tr><td>Department of Mathematics</td><td style="text-align: left;">Harvey Mudd
College</td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2">Send problem reports or requests to <a href="mailto://request@math.hmc.edu"><code>request@math.hmc.edu</code></a></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2">For System News: <a href="http://twitter.com/hmcmathcomp/"><code>http://twitter.com/hmcmathcomp/</code></a></td></tr> </table>
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