Episode: 3476
Title: HPR3476: My mutt email setup
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3476/hpr3476.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 00:07:03

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3476 for Monday the 29th of November 2021.
Today's show is entitled, My Multi-Mail Setup and is part of the series Lightway Tax.
It is hosted by Archer 72 and is about 13 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is My Humble Multi-Mail Setup.
Hello Hacker Public Radio, this is Archer 72 and this is my my my setup.
It won't be as fancy as Clat 2's HPR 1358 on how to set up new PG-GPG
PG-GP compliant encryption system.
Or as in-depth as Frank Bell on HPR 1727 where he explains his basic
mut set up using proc mail and quite a few other things that I don't have in my own setup.
But this is what I have.
I've been using mut for a while and I rebamped my system a little bit with the color scheme
because I had erased all of my emails and to the trash.
I recovered them and I decided it was time to change the color scheme.
I noticed the supporting mut files needed attention to so I just started from the beginning with
mut RC. The very first thing I needed was two factor authentication settings in my gmail.
And most of the email providers should have an option to have an app password for extra security.
I previously made a key in order to encrypt the file that I called pass
and then you shred the pass file with shred tech UB pass which uses verbose mode and show you how it's
shredding it. From the man page, shred overrides a file to hide its contents and option to
delete it. UD allocates and removes the file after overriding and v is like I said verbose and it
shows the progress. This is where the first line in my mut RC comes in. It sources the GPG and
tech D which decrypts and passes it from the dot mut folder and pipes it into mut.
Now I'm ready to look at the color file. I source it from all these sources are going to be from
the dot mut file folder. I mean sourcing is just pulling in data that mut needs from another file.
What got me in trouble before is that I mistakenly tagged the entire
two of my inbox and I couldn't tell the difference because my eyes are getting a little worse.
I couldn't tell the difference between the plus sign next to the email and the asterix which shows
tagged email. So now I have a custom line in the color file that turns the tagged email to a gray
with a yellow font. My example of what tagged versus untagged emails look like I
use the feature of limiting who the emails are from by L for limit and then use tilde and F
for from and then for my example use micro center and you can see the untagged untouched emails are
in cyan color. Now if I don't want to delete everything that I've tagged in this view
I hit semicolon indeed and it'll ask for confirmation or semicolon and if I want to save it to
some something like a if these were newsletters instead I would hit semicolon s and I have
save hooks set up in a different file that I have sourced and it includes options like tilde F
for from and who it's from and then the folder that I want to put it into.
Some of the last few that I have under the newsletter heading are from the info at torproject.org
tilde F just from editor at eff.org and tilde F contacted diode mag.com for diode magazines it's an
electronic magazine and there's a longer one that I have under the recipes heading for anything that's
from my wife that has subject recipe or the body that says recipe or casserole or bake and it all
gets put into a folder under her name and of course saying recipes. The next file I use is the
aliases file so it can access frequently used contacts.
There are two ways to go about adding aliases one when you're over the email that somebody
has sent you and you want to add it just press a and that'll give you options of what you need to do
as far as what you want to name it the given name and that's optional and then the email address
which will be filled in or you can do it by hand alias space the given name of the alias you want
the person's given name if that's given and you use the less than sign the email address inside it
and the greater than sign now if I hit m for mail and I want to email Dave Morris I can start
typing DA and then tab it'll have a list of everything that starts with DA and
it's the only day I know so I hit enter and then put us up just line and start
typing an email to them or when I was doing tags I would type TA and then tab and then it would
fill in tags at hackerpublicradio.org. So now if I want to read email I'll just hit enter
into where it's highlighted and if it's text then I just read it or if it's HTML email I'm
able to review that in the terminal by installing links Lima Yankee November X-ray
now with HTML email comes sometimes quite a few URLs and so you can open these with your
else scan and just press capital U to open the URL dialog and arrow down or actually jk use the
jk keys to go up and down to the one you want and then it should open in the default browser
you also might want to open pictures that people send you so I installed
Faye FOXTRA Echo Hotel and they open up in a new window when you press enter on
when you actually be for view first and then use the jk keys to go down to where the picture is
and then it'll open up in a new window. The last email help where I use is for reading PDFs it's
Zythera. I had followed a link on the arch Linux forum and I thought I needed both Zythera
MU PDF and Zythera PDF popular but it turns out that I only needed MU PDF
because PDF popular at least in Fedora is included with the Zythera program.
The forum mentioned HTML email opening pictures and PDF reader are located
and are located in a mail cap file which I don't know exactly what that is but it was mentioned by
Kato in a previous episode. This just in between Dave Morris and the fan page for mail cap
found out that it's mail metamail capabilities so I got to the end almost and I realized I forgot
to say anything about the .month slash gmail if that's what you're using to be able to set the
hostname i'm app user password which is from that encrypted file from my gpass and the smtp URL
and smtp password which also equals the my gpass in the gbt encrypted file and also the relevant
to and from and the real name and the folder where you want to pull your email from.
Now for more reading there was a rejects question posed by one of the other
posts and I found one of the answers at Tecrophublic 10 helpful tips for my email client power users.
And the other one was on using colors and the uh her hull is a little longer than I want to say
so I will leave that in the show notes.
There is probably a lot that I missed so feel free to record a follow up show or if you have any
questions or comments leave them on the hpr page or email me at ricemark28gmail.com or I'm on
mastodon and matrix at arter72 on mastodon and I'll leave that and also at arter72 colon matrix.org
and then all the two rooms that I'm in that I'll leave in the show notes.
Until next time, goodbye.
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