[help] Disabling email notification not working

[Kurt Hackenberg]

On Sun, Sep 11, 2022 at 06:28:30PM +0000, Charles via Mutt-users wrote:

>> set folder = imap://...
>> set spoolfile = imap://.../INBOX
>>
>> mailboxes -nonotify -nopoll $spoolfile
>> set timeout = 10
>> set mail_check = 600
>> set new_mail_command = "/bin/mpv /noise.mp3"
>
>With this setup, I should not get a notification for a new email, yet, I do.

I don't know exactly what happens there, but two things look 
questionable: $folder and $spoolfile.

According to the Mutt manual, $folder is the pathname of a local 
directory, default ~/Mail, that contains your local mailboxes. That 
seems to be different from what Mutt means by "a folder": a set of 
messages, like an mbox file, a maildir, or an IMAP folder. (A "mailbox" 
is a folder that can receive new incoming mail.) One purpose of $folder 
-- maybe the only purpose -- is to give a value for the shortcut "+" or 
"=", used in pathnames of folders and mailboxes.

This example
<ile:///usr/local/share/doc/mutt/manual.html#ex-multiaccount>
shows $folder generalized to mean the top of an IMAP tree, but again 
it's a place where multiple folders/mailboxes live. Note that example 
sets $folder to imap://host1/, not imap://host1/INBOX. Possibly that 
example sets it just to use the shortcut "+".

$spoolfile, another pathname (default empty string) seems to have 
originally been about the old original Unix mechanism for delivering 
mail into local files, back when every Unix machine where people read 
mail, ran an MTA. The MTA delivered incoming mail for Unix user "fred" 
into, say, /var/mail/fred, an mbox file. When Fred ran a mail reader, 
it moved his new mail from that system spool file to another mbox file 
in his home directory, default ~/mbox. The Mutt variable $spoolfile, 
according to the manual, is a way to specify a non-default location of 
that system spool file. Maybe $spoolfile has been generalized from that 
original meaning to mean something with IMAP; possibly setting 
$spoolfile implies polling.

You might try not setting either of those Mutt variables, and see what 
happens.