Visualising contents of a Maildir

[Sam Kuper]

On Wed, Aug 17, 2022 at 04:59:41PM -0500, Derek Martin wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 17, 2022 at 09:33:44PM +0000, Sam Kuper wrote:
>> 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 suspect what Sam really meant was, "For reasons that would make you
> sad if you knew..." =8^)

I think you mean Martin rather than Sam, but that's OK :)


>>> 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?
> 
> Presumably because in order to *share* such a visualization, i.e. with
> someone remote, they would have to have a copy of the inbox AND run
> Mutt.

Or they could just use SSH.

If the person viewing the visualization should be prevented from
modifying the inbox, then Mutt could be invoked with the `-R`
(read-only) option.

If the person viewing the visualization should be prevented from seeing
the *content* of any of the mails in the inbox, then either:

1.  Configure the muttrc, or the shell hosting Mutt, or Mutt itself
    (edit source and recompile), to intercept and discard any keypresses
    other than the ones for scrolling up and down Mutt's index.
    
    I'd probably attempt those options in that order.

2.  Alternatively (or additionally), the underlying message files in the
    Maildir on the filesystem could be stripped, using a script (Python,
    Bash, whatever) of all but their headers.  This would have some
    perhaps undesirable side-effects, though: it would affect some
    fields displayed in Mutt's index view, such as the number of
    attachments.

    I probably wouldn't bother with this unless the underlying messages'
    contents were especially sensitive (e.g. sensitive personal or
    commercial information).

3.  Alternatively (or additionally) again, those underlying message
    files could instead have their content and attachments replaced by
    an equivalent quantity of Lorem Ipsum, to at least keep file sizes
    and number of attachments constant.

    I probably wouldn't bother with this unless the underlying messages'
    contents were especially sensitive (e.g. sensitive personal or
    commercial information) AND the file size / number of attachments
    metadata were of interest.



> Presumably what you'd want is an image or document that contains the
> desired visualization, that can be displayed by some common tool
> available to the general community, like a web browser,
> company-installed word processor or similar productivity app, etc..

SSH is very widely available.  It's installed by default on GNU/Linux,
and most Unixes including macOS.  It is available for Windows via PuTTY
or Windows Subsystem for Linux.


> Mutt could still meet the need, though it would be some work.  You
> could screenshot each individual page of the index, and then use an
> image editing program to assemble them together.  Maybe--if the
> resulting image was not too large for your application to handle.  Or
> you could just paste each image into a document in a word processor,
> one image per page...

Or use tmux or GNU Screen to copy/paste into a text document?  But
still, creating a whole new interface onto the index view from scratch
seems over-elaborate when Mutt's index view already works perfectly
well.


> It might be possible to create a virtual desktop large enough to
> display the entire index at once, and then use imagemagick or similar
> to capture the window to a file, but I suspect there again you may run
> into memory problems.

Or, again, use tmux or GNU Screen to copy/paste from the virtual desktop
into a text document?  Again, though, building a whole new interface
onto the index view from scratch seems over-elaborate when Mutt's index
view already works perfectly well.

Sam