Some Mutt related questions

[Thomas Stivers]

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Mutt has a great manual that you should look at for answeres to most of
these questions and much much more. On my Debian system the manual can
be found in /usr/share/doc/mutt/manual.txt.gz.

My answeres follow inline.

On 11/29/03  5:13 PM -0000, Darragh wrote:
> Hello,
> I have to say Mutt is a really cool program.  I love it.  I'm using
> fetchmail for getting the mail and sendmail for sending it.  I'm getting a
> server missmatch when using fetchmail but I'll sort that out in a while.
> Everything is working the way its suppose to so its not really causing any
> problems.
> 
> I've decided to use vim for composing mail.  Its not my favorite editor but
> its the only one that I could find a maximumwidth function.  I'd prefear to
> use emacs so if any one knows of a way of setting the maximum line length in
> emacs I'd be very interested in hearing about it.

I actually prefer vim, but in my .emacs file I have

(setq fill-column 72)
(auto-fill-mode)

This wraps lines at 72 like textwidth in vim.

> I notice that when deleting one letter at a time speakup doesn't speak it.
> Is there a way of fixing this?

If you are referring to the same issue as I think you don't hear what
you backspace over in vim. I couldn't figure out what caused it, but a
partial solution/workaround (hack) is to run vim within screen. I don't
know why this works and it doesn't without screen though.

> This only happens in mutt.

Are you sure? Or does it happen when you use vim otherwise.

> I'm also having a problem when writing to lists.  The message that I get is
> at the bottom.  Does any one know what's causing it.
> 
> Is there a way of ignoring all the headers when reading mail?  If this is
> not possible could I get a list of them all so I can put them into the
> .muttrc file?

In your muttrc:

ignore *
unignore from: subject:

> How do I put a signiture into all messages?

In your muttrc:

set signature=.signature

This is the default I believe and put your signature in .signature in
your home directory.

> How can I select an entire line, paragraph or document?

If you're talking about selecting it in vim to select by letter use v by
line use V and by block use ^v then move around until what you want is
selected.

If you want to copy stuff to the clipboard from the mutt screen then use
speakup's cut and paste feature.

> How can I delete by word?  Example control back space or delete in Windows?

Use ^w (ctrl-w) in insert mode in vim.

> How can I activate a link in a message?

If you have urlview installed use ctrl-b to get a list of links in the
message and then arrow to the one you want and press enter. Sometimes
there is a hidden end of line character at the end of urls in urlview,
so you may have to remove it when urlview lets you edit the url.

> How do I set up a kind of address book for keeping track of addresses in
> mutt?

In your muttrc:

set alias_file=~/.mutt/aliases
source ~/.mutt/aliases

Then use a in mutt to add aliases. You can also add aliases with your
editor of choice if you follow the format mut uses..

> How do I get fetchmail to check for message every few minutes?

In your fetchmailrc:

set daemon=300 # poll every 5 minutes

Put this near the top.

> Can I have all the headers on one screen while keeping the message on the
> second one?  Example I press enter on a message, the first screen is after
> that.  I hit space and the message associated with them headers is
> displayed?  This would probably leave a few blank lines between the header
> and the bottom of the screen.

I don't know about doing this, but pressing h while you're viewing a
message will toggle displaying of all headers on and off.

> I know that's a lot of questions.  I'm very sorry.

That's okay, that's what we're here for. Well actually that's what the
mutt users mailing list is here for. You can subscribe by sending a
message with subscribe in the subject to mutt-users-request at mutt.org.

Your delivery error looks like some kind of configuration error on your
server, but I can't say what exactly, sorry. Good luck and I hope you
can get it all working.

- -- 
Unix is a user friendly operating system. It just picks its friends more
carefully than others.
Thomas Stivers	e-mail: stivers_t at tomass.dyndns.org	gpg: 45CBBABD
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