Visualising contents of a Maildir

[Sam Kuper]

On Wed, Aug 17, 2022 at 09:22:31PM +0200, martin f krafft via Mutt-users wrote:
> For reasons you don't want to know,

You may be underestimating the curiosity of your audience.


> I have to visualise a Maildir with a couple of thousand messages, i.e.
> essentially provide a mutt-style index with correspondents, dates,
> subjects, and threading,

So far, so good.  Use Mutt.  It does this very nicely.

(I'm not trying to be facetious - even with my repetitive answers below.
This is a use-case for which Mutt is genuinely well-suited.)


> ideally in form of an HTML table.

This is puzzling, as follows:


- Tables are tabular.

- Threads are digraphs (usually polytrees - although in principle a
  single message can be a reply to *multiple* earlier messages).


So there seems to be something of a topological mismatch between your
intended input data structure and your intended output data structure.



> Apart from the threading, Python's email module can do most of the
> work, and combined with e.g. Jinja templating, I should be able to get
> results quickly, but since I don't like reinventing wheels, I was
> wondering if maybe you had a better idea?

Again, Mutt does this very nicely.  Why not just use Mutt?


> Is there a way to "screenshot" the Mutt index beyond the scroll
> window?

Why would you need to?  In what way does Mutt itself not meet your
requirements?


> Or can you think of command-line tools that visualise threads?

Again: Mutt.

(Emacs can do this, too.  Probably there are other tools as well.)


> Notmuch, which I use, can very quickly list all the threads, including
> the count of messages, but I actually need to list to be *really big*
> and not condensed, for reasons you don't want to know.
> 
> I can make notmuch output json with threading, and then process that
> with Python to create a list, but maybe there's a better tool?

Again, why not just use Mutt?

Sam