[vox-tech] HOWTO: fiddle with mutt

[Jonathan McPherson]

Mike,

>   If anyone else has mutt tips or tricks send them along.

Here are some of my tips:

- To make mutt look more like a split-pane e-mail browser (Mozilla,
  Outlook, etc) in which one pane contains a list of messages and
  another contains the actual message, add this line to your .muttrc:

  set pager_index_lines = 6
  
  where "6" is the number of lines for the top pane.

- I find the arrow that points to selected messages to be annoying and
  redundant. As long as you don't want to access mutt on a non-color
  terminal, try this:
  
  set arrow_cursor = no

- After you exit your $EDITOR, you can spell-check your message by
  typing "i" before sending it (where you usually would type "y"). This
  assumes you have ispell, of course. 

- If you use vim to do your text editing, you might want to consider
  formatting your e-mails with the program "par," which is sort of like
  fmt but more flexible and better-implemented (imho). "par 72q" formats
  e-mail beautifully; "par 72q 4h" is good for making lists with hanging
  indents. 

And some mutt questions for the group:

+ How do I selectively download parts of an e-mail? My e-mail is hosted
  on a server with metered bandwidth, and sometimes I want to use mutt
  to look at the text portion of the e-mail without downloading its
  attachments.

+ All of my e-mail is on an IMAP server. When I move a message from one
  folder to another, the flags on the message (new, replied, etc) in
  the destination folder are the flags from the server. This means that
  if I reply to an e-mail and then save the e-mail to an IMAP folder,
  it will not be have the "replied" flag in the new folder unless I
  first synchronize my current folder to the server by pressing $.
  Folder synchronization takes a few seconds and seems a tiresome task
  to repeat each time I save a message with locally modified flags. Is
  there any way to do this more efficiently?

Jonathan.