Re: [Sheflug] writing to floppy

["Chris J" <xxxxx [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > Nice thing about nmh is that it splits each message into a 
> > seperate file - a system I've grown rather fond of :) 
> 
> Is that Maildir, or something customised? I know Qmail likes that format
> too..

It's the way mail handler has always created its files, and mh predates 
qmail :) nmh is a recent rewrite of mh. mh itself is just a MUA, so all the 
delivery is still left to qmail/exim/sendmail/postfix et al.

So when mail gets delivered to your mail spool, you run "inc" (or have inc 
run from cron) to incorporate your spool into the mh inbox. Then there are 
command line programs ... "scan" (scan a folder), "show" (show a message), 
"forw" (forward a message), "repl" (reply), "comp" (compose message) etc. 
Folders can be nested to a pretty much infinite level (limited only my 
file-system or max length of command line in $SHELL).

Each email is then just stored in the folder as a number ... so the first 
message in the folder is 1, the second is 2, the third 3, etc. What I like 
about this way of storing emails (one a file), is the ability to then use 
shell tools to do things to the mailbox - even if its a quick grep to find 
a particular email :)

Quite flexible. Also allows complete customisation of the headers, so you
can say how you want In-Reply-to: formatted (or just delete the header 
entirely) etc.

It is very powerful. But this is why I'm still learning it - so many 
tweaks, config locations, that it gets a little too much to all know at
once :)

> A noddy "grep 'Subject:' mbox | wc -l" (is there a better way? I looked
> for some mbox tools, couldn't find any, and that seemed good enough...)
> tells me that there are 12667 emails in there - there are probably a
> couple of whoppers in there tho'. Average of about 20k, if my math is
> close.

Subject is bad to grep for if some messages, in their follow-ups, include 
Subject somewhere in quoting the previous message. Or any other reason 
Subject: could appear really :)

Better to grep for '^From ' (yes there is a trailing space there) as this
is the marker that splits mbox messages up. If "From" appearsin a message
at the start of the line, then the MTA/MUA must prefix a ">" or similar,
so that MUA's don't get confused about messages boundries when scanning
mailboxes.

And as Richard posted, you can lose the pipe by passing "-c" to grep :)

Chris...

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