On Fri, 16 Oct 2020 10:14:48 +1100 Cameron Simpson <cs@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 15Oct2020 11:06, Ranjan Maitra <maitra@xxxxxxxxx> 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 _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
