I have a recent experience with nmh that prompts me to sing its praises once
more. I've had my workstation offline for a few weeks now, and didn't really
give it much thought as to how much email I would accumulate in that time. My
normal process for retrieving and filtering email involves fetchmail delivering
to procmail as the MDA. This is a relatively slow way to handle email, given
sheer size of my .procmailrc (I really need to invest time speeding this up),
but when I'm only downloading 100-200 emails at a shot, it's not big deal.
When I attempted to retrieve my email from the now monolithic spool file on the
email server, speed became an issue. There's nothing quite like 26M of email to
filter through to make you appreciate nmh.
Instead of waiting for fetchmail and procmail to do their job, I downloaded a
gzipped copy of the spoolfile from the server and dumped it into my local home
directory. Using "inc", I sucked it all into my inbox. Using refile w/pick
allowed me to chunk through the list of emails in a matter of a few minutes as
opposed to the hours it would have taken otherwise.
No, I don't think it's possible that I'll ever give up nmh. ;-) Alternatively,
I could have used inc to simply split the messages and done a bash for loop to
push each file through procmail, but I hadn't thought of that at the time. ;-)
Regardless, nmh was still a lifesaver.
--
Chad Walstrom <chewie(_at_)wookimus(_dot_)net> | a.k.a. ^chewie
http://www.wookimus.net/ | s.k.a. gunnarr