One solution (I’m sure there are others, maybe better ones) is to make the shell script create a temporary signature file and echo the path to that file, then execute the shell script using backticks.

Shell script (don’t forget to chmod 744):

#!/bin/bash                                                                                          

thesigfile=~/.mutt/rsig

echo  "Marianne Promberger PhD, King's College London
http://promberger.info" > $thesigfile
R --version | head -n 1 >> $thesigfile
cat /etc/issue | head -n 1 | cut -d " " -f 1-2 >> $thesigfile
echo $thesigfile

muttrc:

send-hook '~t r-help' 'set signature=`~/.mutt/signature_r-help`'

Can't locate MIME/Parser.pm in @INC

Solution:

sudo aptitude install libmime-tools-perl

As the title says. Mainly useful for mailing lists like r-help — questions that still need answering. (As if I knew any answers to r-help questions, ha.)

!~x . ~$

Note it combines ~x which looks into the “References:” header, so !~x . means “No References header”, i.e., messages that started a thread (and those from mail agents that don’t reference properly, alas) and ~$ matches unreferenced messages. Default combination for pattern terms is AND.

Of course, use with the lovely limit command and maybe combine with a date range:

!~x . ~$ ~d <1w

(Note no space after the <).

For the stuff below, some settings are obviously optional or a matter of taste, man offlineimap. I’ll note just these:

• Replace YOURKCLLOGIN and YOURPASSWORD (duh)
• localfolders = ~/maildir/kcl: This is you local maildir location, you’ll probably have to change that, and that folder must already exist before you run offlineimap
• folderfilter = lambda foldername: foldername in ['INBOX']: This now just syncs your Inbox! I have this set because I actually archive mail to a different mail server. If you want to create IMAP folders on the KCL server, you’ll obviously have to omit this or fiddle with it — there seem to be quite a lot of folders there by default that seem to be related to MS exchange.

[Account kcl]
localrepository = kcl_local
remoterepository = kcl_remote
autorefresh = 2
quick = 7

[Repository kcl_local]
type = Maildir
localfolders = ~/maildir/kcl

[Repository kcl_remote]
type = IMAP
ssl = yes
port = 993
maxconnections=2
remotehost = kclimap.kcl.ac.uk
remoteuser = kclad\YOURKCLLOGIN
remotepass = YOURPASSWORD
folderfilter = lambda foldername: foldername in ['INBOX']

Addendum

I had holdconnectionopen = true in the settings for kcl_remote when I posted this. OfflineIMAP crashed a lot, and it seems when I take out this setting this happens a lot less.

Note:

• account kcl Can be something else, especially, can be “default” if you want it to be the default.
• Replace “USERNAME” with your username, but make sure you leave the preceding kclad\ in there.
• replace PASSWORD
• tls_trust_file can vary depending on your system. This should work if you use Debian or Ubuntu and have the package ca-certificates installed. If you must, replace with tls_certcheck off
• logfile setting is optional, but recommended

account kcl
host kclsmtp.kcl.ac.uk
user kclad\USERNAME
password PASSWORD
auth on
tls
tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
port 587
logfile ~/.msmtp-log

Still, here’s one of the things I don’t do often enough to remember properly, so I keep messing this up. You need to pay attention to the spaces. Say you are looking for mail sent less than a week ago. The following will not work:

~d < 1w

Use this instead:

~d <1w

Also, remember mutt uses the "AND" operator by default, so do not add & or && to combine searches using AND. Instead, just string them together. Say you want to see all mail to, from, or cc a specific address group, sent in the last seven days, do l for limit, or / for search, followed by:

%L groupname ~d <1w

I wanted a regular expression to match the pattern of mutt mail edit buffers, to apply mail-mode, but I did not want to match the muttrc and mutt.hooks files I have.

Mail edit buffers get a pattern that starts with “mutt”, followed by a combination of dashes, letters and numbers. Examples:

mutt-lauren-ad34AD-
muttadR12
muttadrsd

The pattern mutt[-0-9a-zA-Z]+$ matches these just fine, but it would also match muttrc. So I want a regex that looks for at least three occurrences from the character class described in the brackets. Generally, this is done using {3,} (using the {m,n} pattern to match at least m and at most n occurrences). (You can match exactly n occurrences, by using {3}).

In Emacs, this didn’t work, and it turns out I had to escape the curly brackets twice: mutt[-0-9a-zA-Z]\\{3,\\}$.

Here’s the full section in my .emacs file:

(defun mutt-edit-hook ()
  (setq fill-column 70)
  (setq make-backup-files nil)
  )

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("mutt[-0-9a-zA-Z]\\{3,\\}$" . mail-mode))
(add-hook 'mail-mode-hook 'turn-on-auto-fill)
(add-hook 'mail-mode-hook 'mutt-edit-hook)

I maintain a whitelist of e-mail addresses to save spamassassin some work and myself some false positives.
To do this, I have a script that I run periodically (using crontab). The relevant lines of this script are (there’s some more stuff, since I also use it to blacklist things):

#!/bin/bash
ALIASFILE=$HOME/.mutt/.mutt.aliases
WHITELISTMAN=$HOME/.mutt/my_manual_whitelist
WHITELIST=$HOME/.mutt/my_whitelist
grep @ $ALIASFILE | cut -d "<" -f 2  | cut -d ">" -f 1 | grep -v " " > $WHITELIST
cat $WHITELISTMAN >> $WHITELIST
ping -c1 colobus.isomerica.net > /dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? != 0 ] ; then
  exit 0
else
  rsync $WHITELIST isomerica:.procmail/my_whitelist
fi

The script just gets the e-mail addresses from my mutt alias file, combines this with any addresses from a manually maintained alias file, then uploads that to the server. On the server, the spam handling recipe in ~/.procmailrc does not pipe mail from these addresses to spamassassin, but everything else:

 :0fw
* ! ? (echo "$FROM" | $FGREP -f $WHITELIST)
| spamc
:0:
* ^X-spam-flag: yes
$HOME/.maildir/inbox/.Junk/

• Create a text file that contains all the recipients, one on each line. This can be the full e-mail address, or it can be the alias you have defined in your mutt aliases file (which is your mutt “addressbook”). For our example, we’ll call it recipients.txt
• Create a text file with the text of your message. Let’s call it message.txt.
• Create a bash shell script containing the following:

  #!/bin/bash
  while read line
  do
  mutt $line -s 'Message subject'  < message.txt
  done < recipients.txt

  Where "Message subject" is whatever your message subject should be. Of course, you need to run your shell script from the directory in which the files "message.txt" and "recipients.txt" are stored. Otherwise, you need to substitute their names with the full path name, e.g. ~/message.txt.

• Make your bash script executable and run it. Done. Your individual e-mails should show up in your mailfolder for sent mail (defined by set record=... in your ~/.muttrc.

If your original messages are in an “mbox” format mailbox, you can pipe the messages to formail, which adds the header, and append the messages to the current mailbox (let’s assume it’s called “mycurrentmbox”:

formail -I "X-label: yourlabel" >> mycurrentmbox

Note that this will remove any other “X-label” headers, if present. Alternatively, you might want to check out the -a or -i options (man formail).

I have my mail in “maildir” format, where each mail is an individual file. I use a workaround: pipe all messages to formail, which adds the header, then append to a temporary “mbox” format, delete the original messages in the maildir, then move the messages from the temporary mbox to the original maildir.

In your original maildir, tag and pipe-message, then:

formail -I "X-label: yourlabel" >> mytempmbox

Optionally check that the labeled messages have arrived safely in your temporary mailbox, delete all the tagged (unlabeled) original messages, then go to your temporary mailbox with

mutt -f mytempmbox

tag all messages there, save tagged to the original mailbox. Delete the temporary mailbox.