[vox-tech] tags with mutt

[Gandalf Parker]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 11:31:32PM -0700, Mike Simons wrote:
> > 
> > Is there a way to use tags with email and mutt?
> 
> First search, using mutt's limit "l" command you can filter a 
> folder based on most anything ... header searches are fairly fast.

Thanks for this. This is something I should try. I havent been using tags because other than the spam tag I saw no use for it. But now I think I do.

> Searching on headers was the easy but adding/deleting tags from
> messages seems to requires a little elbow grease.
> 
> Hunting through the manual, I didn't see an obvious way to update
> any specific mail headers.  However there are ways to edit the whole 
> message ... and ways to switch the editor ... so we'll combine those.

I have to say Im really surprised at this from this group. Usually everything is over my head. But on the subject of presort and handling of mail I thought that the standard answer was always procmail. It seems as though every ISP forum or gaming group Ive been in where the question came up that was always the answer. Something like "you can do your own but procmail is almost always available so why"

Procmail is even part of the instructions of many spam handlers and game processors for turn files. As in "turn on procmail handling then include these 4 lines in your procmailrc file. I think its even part of default installation on many linux altho I dont have a way of checking that.

It was such a common answer that I drug my feet for a long time before looking into it (I tend to hate the pat answers). Once I did it got kinda fun. Like many linux programs it goes more for power than ease of use. It allows you to do pretty much anything you want in pre-handling mail but that can be confusing. Lots of googling required.

I see lots of examples for procmail snippets to do tags. Mostly as a way to presort spam. Checking for various subject lines or IP groups it comes from or words in the body, tagging it by changing one of the headers to add a tag like SPAM to the subject or an x-header, then letting it continue into your mailbox for your mail program to handle.

Gandalf  Parker