#&@%....

[chanaleh]

Can someone please explain to me how I (or World) could POSSIBLY have managed to FLUSH my ENTIRE new mail queue (i.e., all my unanswered mail, on the order of 160 messages)? I can understand how it might have dumped everything to a received-mail folder, but I CAN'T FIND ONE (the missing mail is NOT in the folder where I think that stuff would go by default, and there doesn't seem to be any other obvious folder that was altered today).

If I can clear this up, I swear I'll move up from elm to pine, just...! Arrgh!

Comments

[bluepapercup]

Apparently, no one can.

*looks at lack of comments*

sorry :(

[cheesyhill.livejournal.com]

elm -> pine is not an upgrade. Go the whole hog and switch to mutt; the keybindings are mostly even the same!

[donnad.livejournal.com]

Ditch world in favor of *something* else, what *something* I can't offer any suggestions, but we ended up ditching world because of the so many stupid things they do and they got really really unreliable there for a while (I don't know if they still are, but...)

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have thought about that of late, certainly.

However, I wrote and asked about this and they restored my queue from backup -- and increased my disk quota since I was dangerously close (and they thought that might have been a factor in whatever weirdness happened). So, hopefully this will help.

[tenore.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear it on all counts.

mutt

[cos]

Forget pine, switch to mutt.
I ditched elm for mutt five years ago and it has made me much happier.
You can even configure mutt to look a lot like elm, and work a lot like elm - the default key commands are elm-ish. Then you can slowly learn more about it and make changes over time. The more you learn, the more you realize how amazing mutt is.

Some neat tricks you can do with mutt:
- Configure it to automatically convert attachments to text using outside programs, such as using lynx to read HTML email, catdoc to read Word attachments, and xls2csv to read Excel attachments
- Have it do the conversion for you when you reply, so you can quote from Word and HTML emails the same way you would for plain text mail.
- Apply any standard command to a tagged set of messages. So, for example, if you want to reply to three emails at once, tag all three, hit tag-reply (;-r), and you get an email with all three bodies quoted, and all three From addresses in the header (or do tag-groupreply and get all three CC lists too). Or, wanna bounce ten messages to the same two people? Tag all ten, tag-bounce (;-b), type the two addresses, and it'll do them all.
- Really powerful search/selection language, which lets you do things like newsgroup-style expiration on mailing list folders. For example, delete all messages to mailing list "foo" which are older than two months and which I have not read. Or, find any message smaller than 10k which has my name in the message body, and tag it. Lots of useful stuff you can do.
- Define hotkeys to load new sets of headers and sigs. For example, I have several email addresses all forwarding to the same place, so I may be cos@wbrs.org or cos@polyamory.org or whatever. If I want to "switch personalities", I can hit, say, esc-W, and I become cos@wbrs.org, with the appropriate .sig, From: and Organization: headers, and it changes my status line so I can see which personality I'm being. Very very flexible.
Some people also do this automatically with hooks - like, you can tell it to automatically load the cos@wbrs.org stuff when replying to an email that was sent to any address @wbrs.org.
- A much more informative email index display, and very configurable. You can see at a glance which messages are to you, from you, cc'ed to you, sent to a list, meet certain criteria you define, and so on.

[marmota.livejournal.com]

I use pine on world, and frankly I think the problem has nothing to do with your reader of choice. It's their overly aggressive spam filtering that keeps mangling mail there. About once a week or so I'm on the phone to them grumbling about one list or another that's getting blocked... and yet, somehow, I also keep getting spam. Feel free to add your voice to the customer support choir, by demanding they stop server-side filtering and just let their end users deal with it themselves.