haqistan/mblaze-tools

Tooling for my workflow with the mblaze Maildir tools

Tooling for mblaze

I make no advertisements for these scripts except: they are generally short and do one thing. Well...

They enable my email workflow on top of mblaze(7). I use tmux(1) as my UI toolkit, since it is easy to integrate with on the command line and enables useful interactions while hiding messy details (e.g. mouse support). Several scripts do things with tmux, either creating windows/panes or reading/setting the main cutbuffer, where it is assumed there is a msg# in the current sequence. This means you can select a msg# with the mouse in tmux and operate on it; not quite point-and-click but close enough for me. It also means that it's probably best to run mb and friends in their own dedicated tmux session, which makes them look kinda like a real MUA if you squint, but then I personally prefer typing commands to navigating menus.

These scripts assume they are installed on a BSD system, or at least one where the normal BSD utilities are available, including rs(1), fmt(1), awk(1), etc. If you try this somewhere other than OpenBSD you'll also have to make sure Perl is installed.

The mb script uses rl, a small Perl program included in this package; it depends on the Term::ReadLine::Gnu Perl module being installed and by default saves your mb command history in ~/.mb.history. This can all be overridden in your configuration (see below).

You should read mblaze(7) and the rest of the mblaze man pages if you want to understand what is going on here; also, reading tmux(1) is not a terrible idea.

Configuration

I pile on with mblaze and store configuration information in ~/.mblaze/profile in the form of text that looks like email headers; this makes it easy to query the configuration with mblaze's mhdr(1) utility.

Things you can set there:

• CryptFileCmd: command to store plaintext of an encrypted msg
• CryptTmp: temp dir to use in mdecrypt, preferably in a cryptofs
• Editor: editor command, overridden by $EDITOR envar if set
• EncryptCmd: command to encrypt a message (def: gpg)
• Inbox: full path to your main in-box
• InboxName: the relative path of your inbox under Maildir
• MaildirBase: the base directory of your maildir tree
• MdisplayOpts: default options to the mdisplay script
• MpaneLines: size in lines of pane mpane creates for mb
• MBStartQuiet: if set mb behaves as if -q was specified by default
• MBDefaultCmd: command to run when mb starts, def depends on options
• MBReadLineCmd: command to use to read a line in mb, def: rl
• MBHistoryFile: where to store your mb/rl history, def ~/.mb.history

It's probably better to set MaildirBase and InboxName and leave Inbox alone but there are situations where you can't. I generally run all these tools in my home directory and use relative paths to name folders.

If MBDefaultCmd is not set, then it defaults to minbox; if the -n option is specified, then it defaults to mnewbox.

Screenshot

Everyone loves a screenshot, so:

Actual Use

Use at your own risk. On a POSIX system. Preferably OpenBSD. I store my maildir tree under ~/mail, and start this mess from inside of tmux by running mb -n to see new messages in my in-box. My ~/.mblaze/profile has the following two lines at the end:

MaildirBase: /home/attila/mail
InboxName: INBOX

I use fdm to fetch my mail and drop it into various Maildrirs in my mail tree as it comes in; it's nice and well-documented, FWIW. I generally use the msummary script from inside of fdm, to display a summary of what is happening as it goes by in a tmux pane.

The mailcheck script that comes with this package is one way of driving this process; it can be configured via ~/.mblaze/profile but defaults to doing what I do with fdm and mairix. I leave it runing in a tmux pane to show me when new messages arrive.

Likewise, the foldercheck script in this package displays a summary of folders with new messages in them, I also leave it running in a tmux pane to show me where new mail has been filed by fdm.

Both mailcheck and foldercheck can be safely interrupted and will also respond to the SIGINFO signal (^T under BSD) by waking up if they are sleeping and checking for new mail on the server/in local folders.

I also use bmf for last-gasp client-side spam filtering, again via my fdm config. The mspam and munspam scripts tell bmf that a message was a false negative or positive, respectively. They aren't relevant to anyone who doesn't use bmf.

A brief description of what these scripts do:

mb          thin command-line loop to interact with mblaze
mapply      apply our args as a command to each filename on stdin
mdecrypt    given a liste of message numbers/sequences, decrypt them
mdisplay    display a msgno in the tmux cut-buffer in another tmux window
mencrypt    encrypt an outbound message using gnupg (not yet working)
minbox      list your inbox in threaded form, set current msg sequence
mincall     invoke minc on all directories with new mail
mmv         given a destination folder in command line mv files on stdin
 mcp        like mmv but cp's files instead of mv'ing them (symlink -> mmv)
mnewbox     show new messages in given folder
mnewdirs    show all folders with new messages plus a count per folder
mpane       run "mnewbox; mb" in a new tmux pane
mrespam     mark messages on stdin as spam (false negative)
mrm         like mmv but rm the messages on stdin
msign       sign a message using gnupg (run from mcom(1))
 mencrypt   encrypt msg using gnupg (run from mcom(1)) (symlink -> msign)
msummary    print colorized one-line summary of msg on stdin
munspam     mark messages on stdin as not spam (false positive)
foldercheck script I run in a small tmux pane to check for new mail
mailcheck   script I run like foldercheck to fetch mail from servers
rl          small Perl GNU ReadLine interface to give mb editing/history