Getting more useful information in file browser - possible with maildir?

[Chris Green]

On Sat, Sep 26, 2020 at 01:13:11PM -0400, Ben Boeckel wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 26, 2020 at 17:02:08 +0100, Chris Green wrote:
> > However there is a minor downside in the file browser (well directory
> > browser really isn't it), the information shown against the
> > directories (at the bottom level these are maildir mailboxes) is
> > pretty useless, what I am seeing now is like the following:-
> > 
> >      selling/                         Sep 25 12:39     0K
> >      shopping/                        Sep 25 12:39     0K
> >      software/                        Sep 25 12:39     0K
> >      telecoms/                        Sep 25 12:39     0K
> > 
> > No size information and the date is just the date of creation of the
> > parent directory, not the latest message.  With mbox you get a 'last
> > message' date and a meaningful size.
> 
> That's most likely a "last edited" date. Adding flags or labels to a
> message would have reset that time as well. These directories were last
> edited on the date you created them, so not much is going to change
> that. You'd want access time, but that isn't reliable anyways (see
> relatime and noatime mount options) because it makes reads potentially
> very expensive writes to update atimes all the way up the tree.

They're on a fast SSD on the same system as mutt is running on so
'very expensive' is probably not an issue.
> 
> > Are there any configuration options to improve this for maildir?
> 
> Not really? You might be able to get recursive size info, but that's
> potentially very expensive to compute, so isn't usually done by default.
> 
As I said 'very expensive' may not be an issue.


> > This is by no means a show stopper, I'm going to stay with maildir,
> > but it woud be nice to be able to improve it a bit.
> 
> I'd recommend using a "maildir browser" which knows how to interpret the
> information you're looking for (and which mutt is very good at).
> 
?? I'm a bit lost here, you recommend a "maildir browser" and say "...
which mutt is very good at", so is mutt a maildir browser?

-- 
Chris Green