# want to use sylpheed mail-folders with mutt/pine/whatever.

## eNTi

hi everyone.

i've been using sylpheed for quite some time now. i get the mails with fetchmail and deliver them with procmail to .maildir/inbox, ...

i've set sylpheed to use .maildir/ instead of Mail as it's default folder and this works quite well. i'm not sure what this whole mbox or maildir stuff is all about, i figure i could go without them quite well. but i've set maildir as default USE and i want to use .maildir/inbox with mutt as well, because i need some console client for ssh sessions. i'd be happy if anyone could please explain, why one needs this .maildir/ folder at all? i've probably made a mistake by deleting the 3 directories, that were default in that folder, but i really don't need them and i also don't want to use them.

btw., how do i tell pine, not to use mail as it's default mail folder?

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## eNTi

ah common. you guys did this a hundret times or so. isn't there anyone who can explain this in a little detail for the rest of the world? please?

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## kallamej

Yes, it was a mistake to delete the new, cur and tmp folders inside your ~/.maildir. The maildir format stores each mail as file of its own, as opposed to the mbox format where every mail is stored in a single file. New mails are stored in new and are then moved to cur when you've read them. I don't use mutt so I can't say anything about that. As for pine, you can either use pine-maildir and use the patch and instructions provided in bug #28877, or emerge pine-4.58-r3 with maildir as a USE variable. Please be advised, though, that the patch pulled in by that ebuild probably uses Maildir instead of .maildir, unless that has changed since November.

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## eNTi

thx for your reply, even though it does answer not as much, as i hoped for :/. so what the HELL is this maildir mbox all about? i do not need that stuff. this so damn annyoning. on one hand you can configure everything in linux and then you'll have to go with the most static stuff ever. i just don't want this .maildir at all. is it so hard to download your emails once from a pop3 account and read it with all email clients? without converting them around a hundret times?

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## kallamej

Yeah, choices and decisions are hard. Really.  :Smile:  There's some discussion on maildir and mbox in this thread, and most certainly at more places. I can't tell you what you should use, but I guess the support for mbox is slightly more common.

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## BlinkEye

although it's been said in the thread mentioned above - i put it simple: never use mailbox. it's really stupid applications support or use it. mailbox is one big file with all mails appended - what could be to advantage of that? the idea of mbox must be copied from windoze's registry   :Twisted Evil: 

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## AdShea

the problem is that sylpheed uses mh, not maildir  I think mutt can handle this, but i don't have a clue how to set it up

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## eNTi

(not true. sylpheed uses maildir. I'M using sylpheed+maildir. actually, you can choose between maildir and mbox with sylpheed (depending on useflag).)

edit: well i was wrong in this respect.

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## AdShea

No, if your sylpheed were using the Maildir format, it would have had problems with you deleting the new cur and tmp directories.  Sylpheed uses MH to store it's messages, and fetchmail/procmail can deliver them into this format.  All the maildir useflag does for sylpheed is makes it build the code that lets sylpheed read maildir.  It still uses MH for storage though.

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## eNTi

well you are right. i wasn't aware of that. i'll edit my post.

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