mutt v. the world (Re: [Techtalk] What I did over the Christmas Holidays!)

[David Merrill]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 09:44:14AM +1100, Mary Gardiner wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 01, 2002 at 02:59:02PM -0800, Akkana wrote:
> > But there is one disadvantage of this model: it means that I end
> > up composing all my mail over telnet (or rsh or ssh or whatever)
> > connections instead of on my local machine, and I'm forever hitting long
> > network delays (wait 20+ seconds to see what I just typed).  I've long
> > been wanting to come up with a setup so that I can read my mail with
> > telnet/mutt, but compose outgoing mail locally (without having to do a
> > lot of manual saving and ftp'ing of files).  Surely I'm not the only one
> > to have this desire, but I've never seen any mention of a mailer set up
> > that way.  Has anyone heard of such a setup?
> 
> With mutt I'd imagine that this is more of an editor issue than a mailer
> issue. mutt's model is to open your chosen editor and point it at a file
> it creates in /tmp containing the mail message to edit (I imagine it can
> be pointed at alternative temp directories).
> 
> However, I've never considered how to get it to, for example, open an
> editor on a remote machine, or at least give you a file to edit. I
> suspect this would be difficult for security reasons, but I'll play
> around with the idea a little and let you know how I go.

You should be able to replace the call to an "editor" with a call to a
script, which could do anything you wanted it to do.

-- 
David C. Merrill                         http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project                   david at lupercalia.net
Collection Editor & Coordinator            http://www.linuxdoc.org

Microsoft's goal is domination of the global information business, which is
to say all business. Phone companies, cable television companies, post
offices, stock exchanges, banks, treasury departments -- all of these are
viewed by Microsoft as future competitors.
	--Robert X. Cringely, PBS Columnist