mutt workflow and mail filtering

[Cameron Simpson]

On 11May2019 20:58, benfitzg at gmail.com <benfitzg at gmail.com> wrote:
>I'm also curious why an MDA seems baked into most mail filtering 
>options, like procmail. In a world where people want to forward emails 
>from one account to another, an MDA that goes via a mailserver like 
>sendmail/dovcot is a must, but for local processing it's overkill, and 
>I'd imagine most people fall into the latter bucket. For me running a 
>mail server to interface with a MDA is just too much on a shared unix 
>server in a corporate environment.

I suspect that with procmail and the like, having the MDA capable of 
delivering to a filter programme solves the issue of seeing email 
arrive.  It also predates Maildirs, which are robust for multiple 
concurrent users; fetching-and-deleting out of an active mbox is a 
nightmare of locking cooperation.

>I just want to have something look at the headers of every mail that 
>comes into my INBOX and then put *some* of those in another Maildir, 
>all of which reside on the same filesystem under the same subfolder.

Procmail nearly does this, but as you observe it likes an MDA of some 
kind to hand messages to it.

I think if I give my mailfiler some kind of "pass" rule it should be 
capable of this. Give me a few days. The cleanest thing is probably to 
support the having default target be the current folder. Then a rule 
file specifying only the things to move would suffice.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs at cskk.id.au>