[MlMt] A Few Questions/Suggestions

[Claire Connelly]

Hi, all,

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).

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).

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.)


* 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.

  The `scan(1)` format code for that is

         %<(mymbox{from})%<{to}To:%14(friendly{to})%>%>

  and gives you something like

         % scan
         1  mary at hahvahd.edu   rcvtty -- how do I use it?<<I've been
         2  Al Bok             Query about "repl -query"<<I have a q
         3  "Wilbur, Orville"  X Terminal Presentation/Demonstration
         4  To:"Wilbur, Orvil  Re: X Terminal Presentation/Demonstra

  (from http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/mh/morsca.html#sca; format 
string definitions at 
http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/mh/mhstr.html).

  Thus one address field can do the work of both the To and From fields.

* 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.)


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?

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.


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.)


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!

    Claire

Claire Connelly                              cmc at math.hmc.edu
System Administrator                           (909) 621-8754
Department of Mathematics                 Harvey Mudd College

Send problem reports or requests to request at math.hmc.edu.
For System News: http://twitter.com/hmcmathcomp/.
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