[Discussion] How to you integrate mblaze in your email stack ?

[sucrecacao]

Hello,

I'm currently migrating from classic web based email client to a more unix way to manage my email.

I'm so happy I found mblaze ❤️ , since I had hard time finding a "suckless" set of email tools where each does one thing and to it well. I don't want to use neomutt or aerc as I find those bloated and hard to hack.

But I still have trouble putting all the piece of the puzzle together.. So I was wondering if you those tool in your daily email workflow, what is your stack and how do you use it ? ( Link to script or dot-files highly appreciated :p )

In advances, thanks :)

[Anachron]

Hey @sucrecacao this might be a bit late, but I compose messages with mcom and then send them via msmtp.
I use a few wrapper scripts to change my mblaze & msmtp default account.

mfrom

test "$#" -eq 0 && awk -F ':' '$1 == "Local-Mailbox" {print $2}' ~/.mblaze/profile | xargs && exit
acc=$(sed -n "/^account[ ]*${1}$/,/^$/p" ~/.msmtprc | awk '$1 == "from" {print $2}')
if test -n "${acc}"; then
  sed -i "s|^Local-Mailbox.*|Local-Mailbox: ${acc}|" ~/.mblaze/profile
  sed -i "s|^Outbox.*|Outbox: ${HOME}/usr/mls/${1}/OUTBOX|" ~/.mblaze/profile
  ! test -e ~/.mblaze/signature || rm ~/.mblaze/signature
  ! test -f "${HOME}/usr/mls/${1}/signature" || ln -s "${HOME}/usr/mls/${1}/signature" ~/.mblaze/signature
  sed -i "s|account default.*|account default: ${1}|" ~/.msmtprc
  printf 'Switched to "%s"\n' "${acc}"
fi

[sucrecacao]

Thanks @Anachron !

How is your workflow to browse your email ?
Do you download them and navigate around with a file manager like nnn?

[Anachron]

Hello @sucrecacao,

I download them via mbsync and browse through them via mbrowse, a self-written script which uses fzf to display the header and content part of a mail, internally it uses mscan (like mless) to display a human-friendly mail-list.

It's a little bugged but I do plan on updating and making it public eventually.

Edit: The advantage of mbrowse is that I can easily reply, extract attachments and trash mails. I simply need to select one (or multiple) mails and confirm, then select the action and it's done.

[Vouivre]

Hello @Anachron,

I'm also trying to find a good workflow with mblaze. Could you share your script mbrowse. Is it
available somewhere ?

[Anachron]

Not yet publicy available, it requires a few scripts from myself so that it knows where to read mails from.

I'll see if I can publish them somewhere for others to learn from.

[Vouivre]

I'll see if I can publish them somewhere for others to learn from.

It would be nice! I slowly understand how it works, but perhaps sometimes I make everything complicated and an easy solution exists. I discovered for example mless and saw that it's possible to use colors.

So excepted the issues for mblaze, I only know those ressources:

https://voidlinux.org/news/2017/12/advent-mblaze.html
https://voidlinux.org/news/2017/12/advent-mblaze-part-2.html

It's a beginning, but at some point, some scripts are needed.

For the moment I also tend to use fzf in my scripts.

I will also publish my scripts if I get something functional.

[Shugyousha]

I have written up some info about my setup here: https://sillymon.ch/posts/mmh-blaze-mail-setup.html

My usual email workflow looks like this.

$ mall # put all new emails into my selection
$ mless # start interactive pager to go through all my new mails one by one
$ mread # mark all the mails as read

Note that I have added a binding to delete the current email on D for the mless script.