My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues

[Cameron Simpson]

On 31Jan2021 21:16, boB Stepp <robertvstepp at gmail.com> wrote:
>1)  I eventually want to migrate all of my Gmail to ProtonMail.  I will
>probably never entirely get rid of Gmail.  For one thing it makes a good
>honey pot for when I must supply an email, but do not want to give out my
>preferred email.

Might I suggest mailinator.com for this? It's a free service which 
accepts email for _any_ address @mailinator.com (and a suite of other 
domains for when systems special case reject mailinator). Messages are 
kept for a short preriod of time and only the text component. You can 
look at them with a web browser interface. There are no passwords (so 
pick a random address to avoid collisions). It is handy for 
temporary-but-necessary addresses, or for "boring" addresses (vendor 
spam).

>But I would like to at least minimize the data they collect on me.
>My distant end goal is to separate from Google software entirely, but doing that seems
>difficult until I determine how to solve my Android phone dilemmas.  But that is not a
>concern for Mutt!

I forward all email from the GMail account which is "To:" the GMail 
address, to my real address cs at cskk.id.au. I do leave it behind (so 
archived, not deleted) at the GMail end.

>I see two routes towards this migration:  (a) Forwarding all Gmail to
>ProtonMail and only have Mutt track ProtonMail.  As I get time I will
>notify everyone to use my new email address.

I do that (GMail -> cs at cskk.id.au). If nothing else, there will always 
be services with you GMail address (or whatever old address).

>2)  I would like to remove all email storage from the cloud, that is,
>whether Gmail or ProtonMail, once I have my mail on my local PC I want to
>delete it from those accounts.  What would be the best way to do this?

I collect from my cs at cskk.id.au account using getmail with a setting 
which deletes collected messages. So the actual cs at cskk.id.au inbox is 
normally empty.

>3)  I would like my local storage of my emails to allow for me to store
>certain content types in sensible folders.  For example, Python Tutor emails
>that I want to keep I would like to store in a Python Tutor folder, Mutt
>emails in a Mutt folder, etc.

Pretty sure I'm mentioned this before. My process is getmail from 
cs at cskk.id.au, and a separate programme to file messages. I have my own 
(mailfiler), but procmail and other tools are popular.

>Probably I would best be served by a manual,
>not an automatic, moving into desired folders as I will be picky as to those
>emails I would like to keep.  What would be the best advice on this?

Then tag messages in you inbox and ";s+folder" to move them in batches.  
Here I mean mutt's (t)ag keystroke, an in memory flag. Emphemeral, used 
entirely to do mutt things to an ad hoc batch of messages.

>5)  I would like to be able to auto-backup locally stored emails on my 
>PC to another hard drive on my local network.  I guess this would be 
>facilitated by a sensible organization of my PC's email storage?

Yes. Though I keep all my email in a large "mail" directory (with many 
Maildir subdirectories). I back up that whole directory to local another 
server every so often. I do that with an external shell script, as I 
also back up other stuff.

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