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3.19.1.3 Differences in MH Program Behavior ¶

anno

The prompt in interactive mode is ‘Component name:’, instead of ‘Enter component name:’ displayed by the RAND anno.

If a -component field is not specified and standard input is not connected to a terminal, anno does not display the prompt before reading the component from the standard input. RAND anno displays the prompt anyway.

burst

The utility is able to burst both RFC 934 digest messages and MIME multipart messages. It provides two additional command line options: -recurse and -length.

The -recurse option instructs the utility to recursively expand the digest.

The -length option can be used to set the minimal encapsulation boundary length for RFC 934 digests. Default length is 1, i.e. encountering one dash immediately following a newline triggers digest decoding. It is OK for messages that follow RFC 934 specification. However, many user agents do not precisely follow it, in particular, they often do not escape lines starting with a dash by ‘- ’ sequence. Mailman is one of such agents. To cope with such digests you can set encapsulation boundary length to a higher value. For example, bounce -length 8 has been found to be sufficient for most Mailman-generated digests.

comp

Understands -build option.

fmtdump

This command is not provided. Use fmtcheck instead.

inc

• The -moveto option. The -moveto option instructs inc to move messages into another folder after incorporating them. This option has effect only if the -truncate option has also been specified and the underlying mailbox supports the ‘move’ operation. Currently only ‘imap’ and ‘imaps’ mailboxes support it. For example, the following command moves incorporated messages into the ‘archive’ folder:

  inc -file imaps://imap.gmail.com -moveto=archive
  

  The ‘moveto’ URL parameter can be used instead of this option, e.g.:

  inc -file 'imaps://imap.gmail.com;moveto=archive'
  

• Multiple sources Mailutils inc is able to incorporate messages from several source mailboxes. These are specified via multiple -file options, e.g.:

  inc  -truncate \
       -file 'imaps://imap.gmail.com;moveto=archived' \
       -file pops://mail.gnu.org \
       -file /var/mail/root
  

• URL parameters The following additional parameters can be used in the mailbox URLs supplied with the -file option:

  moveto=folder

  Moves incorporated messages into another folder. This was discussed above.

  nomoveto

  Disables the previous -moveto option.

  truncate[=bool]

  Controls source mailbox truncation. If bool is not given or it is ‘yes’, the mailbox will be truncated after successful processing. If bool is ‘no’, the source mailbox will not be truncated.

mhl

The ‘ignores’ keyword can be used in variable list. In that case, if its value contains more than one component name it must be enclosed in double-quotes, e.g.:

leftadjust,compwidth=9,"ignores=msgid,message-id,received"

The above is equivalent to the following traditional notation:

leftadjust,compwidth=9
ignores=msgid,message-id,received

The ‘MessageName’ component is not yet implemented.

Interactive prompting is not yet implemented.

The following format variables are silently ignored: ‘center’, ‘split’, ‘datefield’.

mhn

• New option New option -compose forces mhn editing mode. This is also the default mode. This differs from the standard mhn, which switches to the editing mode only if no other options were given and the input file name coincides with the value of mhdraft environment variable.
• Show mode (-show) If an appropriate mhn-show-type[/subtype] was not found, GNU mhn prints the decoded message content using moreproc variable. Standard mhn in this case used to print ‘don't know how to display content’ diagnostic.

  The default behaviour is to pipe the content to the standard input of the mhn-show-type[/subtype] command. This is altered to using a temporary file if the command contains %f or %F escapes.

• Store mode (-store) If the Content-Disposition header contains ‘filename=’, and mhn is invoked with -auto switch, it transforms the file name into the absolute notation and uses it only if it lies below the current mhn-storage directory. Standard mhn only requires that the file name do not begin with ‘/’.

  Before saving a message part, GNU mhn checks if the file already exists. If so, it asks whether the user wishes to rewrite it. This behaviour is disabled when -quiet option was given.

mhparam

The -all mode does not display commented out entries.

pick

New command line option -cflags allows to control the type of regular expressions used. The option must occur right before --component pattern or equivalent construct (like -cc, -from, etc.)

The argument to this option is a string of type specifications:

B	Use basic regular expressions
E	Use extended regular expressions
I	Ignore case
C	Case sensitive

Default is ‘EI’.

The flags remain in effect until the next occurrence of -cflags option.

Sample usage:

pick -cflag BC -subject '*a string' 

The date comparison options (-before and -after accept date specifications in a wide variety of formats, e.g.:

pick -after 20030301
pick -after 2003-03-01
pick -after 01-mar-2003
pick -after 2003-mar-01
pick -before '1 year ago'
etc...

prompter

1. Prompter attempts to use GNU Readline library, if it is installed. Consequently, arguments to -erase and -kill option must follow GNU style key sequence notation (see keyseq in GNU Readline Library).

   If prompter is built without readline, it accepts the following character notations:

   \nnnn

   Here, n stands for a single octal digit.

   ^chr

   This notation is translated to the ASCII code ‘chr + 0100’.

2. Component continuation lines are not required to begin with a whitespace. If leading whitespace is not present, prompter will add it automatically.

refile

1. Linking messages between folders goes against the logic of Mailutils, so refile never makes links even if called with -link option. The latter is actually a synonym for -copy, which preserves the original message.
2. The -preserve option is not implemented. It is retained for backward compatibility only.
3. Message specs and folder names may be interspersed.

repl

Understands -use option. Disposition shell provides use command.

rmm

1. Different behaviour if one of the messages in the list does not exist:

   Mailutils rmm does not delete any messages. Standard rmm in this case deletes all messages preceding the non-existent one.

2. The rmm utility will unlink messages, if the rmmproc profile component has empty value, e.g.:

   rmmproc:
   

sortm

New option -numfield specifies numeric comparison for the given field.

Any number of -datefield, -textfield and -numfield options may be given, thus allowing to build sort criteria of arbitrary complexity.

The order of -.*field options sets the ordering priority. This differs from the behaviour of the standard sortm, which always orders datefield-major, textfield-minor.

Apart from sorting the mailfolder the following actions may be specified:

-list

List the ordered messages using a format string given by -form or -format option.

-dry-run

Do not actually sort messages, rather print what would have been done. This is useful for debugging purposes.