gmane.mail.alpine.info

Re: how to send message with attachment from crontab?

Mike Miller — 2013-05-21T08:34:21



Thanks, Eduardo.  I guess I'll just use mutt for now.

In case anyone cares, I found that the newest version of gcalcli (v. 3.1) 
works different, so I rewrote the script:

http://genetsim.org/gcalcli/mail_tomorrow_schedule

I've also expanded a little on what it does.

It isn't about Alpine or email, but if anyone is interested in gcalcli, 
they might want to look at the other scripts that I wrote today:

http://genetsim.org/gcalcli/

The file "description.txt" will give you an idea of how they are used.

Mike

Re: how to send message with attachment from crontab?

Eduardo Chappa — 2013-05-20T19:48:10


Dear Mike,

  Alpine does not do this, unless you patch it. There is patch that does 
this at

http://patches.freeiz.com/alpine/info/outgoing.html

   I hope this helps.

Re: how to send message with attachment from crontab?

Mike Miller — 2013-05-20T19:35:57



One thing I was missint:  That command will start the agenda from the 
current time on the following day, which was not what I wanted.  I wanted 
it to start at 0:00 -- the beginning of the day.  So I needed this 
instead:

gcalcli agenda "$(date -d 'tomorrow 0:00')"

And I have updated the script accordingly:


-----------begin script on next line-----------------------
#!/bin/bash

RECIPIENT=$(whoami)

TMPFILE=$(mktemp /tmp/delete_me.XXXXXX) || exit 1

gcalcli agenda "$(date -d 'tomorrow 0:00')" > $TMPFILE
gcalcli --nc --cals owner agenda "$(date -d 'tomorrow 0:00')" | mutt -s "Schedule for Tomorrow" -a $TMPFILE -- $RECIPIENT

rm -f $TMPFILE
----------end script on previous line----------------------


That's a very important change because I will run the script at the end of 
the day to get the schedule for the following day.  The way I had written 
it, I would never see my important appointments.

Best,
Mike

how to send message with attachment from crontab?

Mike Miller — 2013-05-20T19:01:15

I wanted to do this using Alpine, but I figured out how to do it using 
mutt (info below).  I still want to know if Alpine can do this.

I want my system to send me an email message with an attachment at a 
certain time of day.  I see that Alpine has this option:

-attach file        Send mail with the listed file as an attachment.

The problem I'm is that Alpine does not seem to work non-interactively. 
So Alpine always appears on the screen waiting for me to send the message.

Is there a way to make Alpine just send the message without interaction? 
If not, I can't use it from a crontab.

I found a way to do it with mutt:

some_process | mutt -s "my subject" -a file_to_attach -- my_address

The output of "some_process" becomes the message body.

I was seeing some inconsistency in the way mutt is handling a text/plain 
'file_to_attach':  It sometimes uses the wrong charset and alters the 
appearance of the file (specifically messing up the degree symbol °). 
I'd rather have it always use base64 encoding like Alpine does with the 
same file, but I don't know how to fix that.

More below on what I'm actually doing in case any of you are interested.

Mike


--------------------------------------------------------------------------


What I'm doing with Google Calendar

I use Google Calendar and I am having gcalcli send me my schedule 
("agenda") every evening to remind me of appointments and meetings for the 
next several days.  So the command is...

gcalcli agenda "$DATE"

...where $DATE represents the desired start date (5 days of output is 
given).  The output is ANSI color coded.  To get output for five days 
starting tomorrow, I do this:

gcalcli agenda "$(date -d tomorrow)"

To remove the color I can do this:

gcalcli --nc agenda "$(date -d tomorrow)"

However, the color is informative.  My wife's calendar entries are mixed 
in with mine, but mine are in cyan and hers are in green.  Holidays and 
weather info are in magenta.  I can use grep to retain the cyan and 
magenta parts of the output along with the date info (36 is cyan and 35 is 
magenta)...

gcalcli agenda "$(date -d tomorrow)" | grep -P '\e\[0;36m|\e\[0;35m|^[FMSTW]'

...and I can add back in the the removed line between dates...

gcalcli agenda "$(date -d tomorrow)" | grep -P '\e\[0;36m|\e\[0;35m|^[FMSTW]' | perl -pe 's/^([FMSTW])/\n$1/'

...or I can do that while also removing the ANSI color:

gcalcli agenda "$(date -d tomorrow)" | grep -P '\e\[0;36m|\e\[0;35m|^[FMSTW]' | perl -pe 's/\e.*?m//g ; s/^([FMSTW])/\n$1/'

Doing it that way had some benefits, but I have decided that I'll just 
stick with output for myself alone and without the weather info by using 
the --cals owner option:

gcalcli --nc --cals owner agenda "$(date -d tomorrow)"

Alpine won't display ANSI color (it used to do that), but if the ANSI 
color is in an attachment, then it works if I view attachments using less 
with the -R option.  I had two lines in /etc/mailcap that evoked "less" 
with no options, so I added -SR as options to less (I also have those in 
my bash aliases, but that seems to be ignored by mailcap):

text/plain; less -SR '%s'; needsterminal
text/*; less -SR '%s'; needsterminal

I want to see my calendar info two ways in these email notifications: 
(1) the no-color calendar in the message body showing only my own 
appointments and (2) the ANSI-color calendar in an attachment showing 
everything (e.g., my wife's appointments, weather, holidays).

This script is doing exactly what I want, even when called from cron, but 
see the note below about cron:


-----------begin script on next line-----------------------
#!/bin/bash

RECIPIENT=$(whoami)

TMPFILE=$(mktemp /tmp/delete_me.XXXXXX) || exit 1

gcalcli agenda "$(date -d tomorrow)" > $TMPFILE
gcalcli --nc --cals owner agenda "$(date -d tomorrow)" | mutt -s "Schedule for Tomorrow" -a $TMPFILE -- $RECIPIENT

rm -f $TMPFILE
----------end script on previous line----------------------


At first that script was working differently from cron than from the 
command line.  I got some help from this web page and fixed it:

http://www.logikdev.com/2010/02/02/locale-settings-for-your-cron-job/

I had to add this line to /etc/environment:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Then I had to restart cron:

sudo service cron restart

After that it worked perfectly.


For reasons I cannot explain, mutt used to do this when called from the 
command line or from cron:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="delete_me.KRE97M"

That looked OK in Alpine, but mutt had turned the degree symbols (°) to 
double question marks:

Tue May 21  12:00am  Forecast for Minneapolis, MN (70?? | 50??)

For some reason the attachents are now looking perfect in Alpine with 
proper degree characters and this encoding and charset info:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="delete_me.Ohil3z"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

I don't know what caused mutt to change, but it might have been the file 
extension:  I was using .txt at first and now I am using a random number 
string.


Best,
Mike

Backend mailbox manipulation/parsing tools?

Dan Mahoney, System Admin — 2013-05-17T19:26:15

Hey all,

This isn't strictly alpine related, but as the people on this list tend to 
be some very power-user mail types, I'll ask it.

I use alpine, and other clients.  On alpine, when I want to take an 
action, like report a mail to spamassassin, I use the "pipe" command.

However, as I'm also using iDevices and IMAP (Dovecot), I'm trying to come 
up with ways to control mail flow from those devices.

Specifically, I think that by creating special mailboxes that do things, I 
can dynamically build procmailrc parts, report spam and ham, and other 
cool bits.  So, for example, I'd like to build a "threadkill" folder, 
which would mute a mailing list thread, but let everything else hit my 
inbox.

So here's the question for the group.  What I'm really looking for is a 
tool that can work with a mailbox (UW's "mailutil" might have been such a 
tool), in a dovecot/imap/alpine friendly access format, act on messages in 
a folder, and delete/move.   Ideally I'd do this in perl, and would just 
be looking for a general "handle one message" tool.

Does anyone know of anything like this?  The  gnu mailutils seem like 
overkill and overly complex.  Parsing the raw mailbox doesn't let me 
really control flags and message moving.  UW's mailutil does SOME of this, 
but doesn't seem to know about the various locks (it's not very 
multi-access friendly).

I'm listening!

-Dan

Re: can't figure out how to imap gmail with alpine2.00 (ala opensuse)

Marco Beishuizen — 2013-05-17T16:35:57


My guess is that it needs to be (I have it like this with no problems):
imap.gmail.com/novalidate-cert/ssl/user=xxxx-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org

regards,
Marco

Re: Re: can't figure out how to imap gmail with alpine2.00 (ala opensuse)

James Freer — 2013-05-17T07:41:14

Perhaps i'm not using the correct terminology. With imap the email client 
downloads the headers to maildir directory, and then when one reads the email 
it goes to the server and retrieves it. Much quicker than pop. The way i 
use alpine is just to read mail on the server without downloading of 
headers - basically by passing the gmail UI which is what i thought you 
wanted.

Using linux with updates, to me there doesn't seem any point in setting up an 
email client like Thunderbird. I tried it a few weeks ago on my spare machine 
and it was downloading headers for ages - need to do a purge on this email 
address it's got massive. But alpine still retrieves all at speed. The negative 
is that i can't make use of threads (i did try it and it was too slow)... then 
i just switch to the gmail UI to make use of their 'conversations'.

There's probably a better way of customising Alpine but i haven't looked into 
it yet. For deleting and expunging i use the gmail UI.


Perhaps you'd like the MH way that's in Sylpheed - all emails are saved 
individially rather than mbox or maildir. Sylpheed was very fast (compared with 
Evolution and Thunderbird) but i preferred Alpine.

Could you not set up another directory on gmail and transfer stuff there, then 
if there's a mistake it's easier to retrieve. Or use the gmail Inbox and Sent 
folders and just archive periodically. I've never liked the 'inbox' flag and so 
i bypass the inbox and read on All mail.


Sure i'll do it evening or tomorrow - i've got to be away for the rest of 
today. Maybe i'm not doing it the best way and after you've seen how i set it 
up - you'll have a better way maybe.

james

Re: can't figure out how to imap gmail with alpine 2.00 (ala opensuse)

JtWdyP — 2013-05-17T04:38:08


It would appear that on May 15, James Freer did say:


Not sure what you mean by downloading headers... My daughter will usually
access her e-mail via her phone. And sometimes with gmail web user interface.

I'm the one who can't stomach the web UI for long.

But she wants me to occasionally do things she can't currently figure out,
{she has intermittent cognitive issues since the car crash/head trauma} So 
I can expect to have to help her every now and then. In which case I'd
much rather use alpine's UI to find the few she doesn't want to delete
before expunging the rest for her etc... On this occasion she also wanted
stuff from a former friend dumped into a personal quarantine folder.


This is close to what I'd want to do only instead of simply expunging the
stuff she wants gone, I'd prefer to save it to a local folder long enough for
my daughter to tell me I got rid of the right ones...

But even after attempting to follow your example, I'm failing to connect to
her gmail account. So, if you wouldn't mind sending that copy of your pinerc
so I can figure out what I'm doing wrong, I'd appreciate it...

Re: can't figure out how to imap gmail with alpine2.00 (ala opensuse)

2013-05-15T12:10:11

[snipped]

Actually alpine can do both, a colleague I work with uses a headless
alpine (in screen) doing his gmail filtering as it's more powerful than
using gmail's. That said I would be nervous of suggesting this as the
best way to do things, he has a desktop on UPS. I use use the
reliatively limited gmail filters to acheive what I want and mostly use
alpine readonly (save for "read" status).

I'd recommend using an imap syncing tool like offlineimap.py

On my secure work desktop I use this to build a Maildir hierarchy which
I then use Eduardo's Maildir patch to read emails, as it's a bit faster
than imap directly. Remotely I directly imap to gmail so it's in the
cloud and no data is stored on my own machines.

Be sure to configure the expunge option to not autoexpunge, also if the
email account is huge, it's best to hide "All Mail" as that can eat up
enough ram of your box as it caches and indexes 100s of thousands of
emails if you open it.

This looks okay, I have:

inbox-path={imap.gmail.com/ssl/novalidate-cert/user=damion-hpIqsD4AKlfQT0dZR+AlfA< at >public.gmane.org}inbox

So if you're getting timeouts it could be a different issue. Try this:

openssl s_client -connect imap.gmail.com:imaps

You should get loads fo output ending with something like:

* OK Gimap ready for requests from xxx.16.xx.23 u16ifxxxxxxxij.48

0 logout will exit.

The error indicates problems connecting and pulling from gmail so I'd
debug that side before assuming the config is wrong.

Try some sample imap debugging after the openssl command I mention
earlier.

As for incoming folders, I have a few, here are a couple that work for
my "uk-misc" and "details" label (auto filtered via config in the gmail
ui)

incoming-folders=uk-misc {imap.gmail.com/ssl/novalidate-cert/user=damion-hpIqsD4AKlfQT0dZR+AlfA< at >public.gmane.org}uk-misc, details "{imap.gmail.com/ssl/novalidate-cert/user=damion-hpIqsD4AKlfQT0dZR+AlfA< at >public.gmane.org}details",

HTH

- Damion

Re: can't figure out how to imap gmail with alpine2.00 (ala opensuse)

James Freer — 2013-05-15T11:02:06

I'm no expert but i think i can see where you are going wrong. The beauty of 
alpine is that you can set it up to read the gmail server instead of using the 
gmail UI which is what i do (i then also use the gmail UI for certain things). 
As for saving emails offline that is then making things a little more 
complicated. From what i can see you are setting up to download headers like 
Thunderbird or others (using gmail-inbox etc). Disadvantage of that is that you 
then download all the headers on your next install of linux (9 months for you 
with Suse i think - i'm on xubuntu which is 6 months).

Setting up just to read the server is easy (i can send you my pinerc if you 
like) but it's easier to do it in Setup which then writes the pinerc for you. 
Your daughter could then save particular important emails as txt using Export 
which is what i do. I've found the Gmail server very good and haven't ever lost 
emails so don't see the point in saving offline.

Without checking (because i'm using Alpine as i'm typing!) do the following a] 
In setup you have to check the following lines; put in an email domian (e.g. 
gmail.com that you don't refer to but it'll give read letters otherwise, check 
collections, sort-key=Arrival/Reverse (that's the way i like it), 
index-format=STATUS MSGNO FROMORTO(10%) SUBJECT, folder collections = 
jessejazza3.uk 
{imap.gmail.com:993/ssl/user=jessejazza3.uk-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org}[[Gmail]]/[] (listing all 
you email address - i've got six),

b] Set up your roles for each email address and that's it.

What you lose reading the server is threads but easier when one does a new 
linux install. My email boxes are quite full but Alpine handles it perfectly so 
i've not looked further into Setup.

hth
james

can't figure out how to imap gmail with alpine 2.00(ala opensuse)

JtWdyP — 2013-05-15T04:17:23

I've used alpine exclusively as my mail client ever since I gave upon pine. And
pine ever since I gave up on mailx... Even so, I'm not really an expert using
it. It's more like I can't stand any other email client enough to learn to use
it... And that goes double for web mail interfaces.

So when my not so computer literate daughter wanted me to help her with her
gmail account, I said I could probably get the job done with alpine.

She wanted everything from a certain sender backed up offline, and dumped into
a separate folder that she wouldn't need to look at. She wanted her sent mail
archived offline. And almost everything else deleted... When I asked her if
she wanted future emails from that same former friend blocked, she asked if
they could go directly to the same folder without her having to look at them,
I said I could probably get that done too.

Of course I knew I'd have to use gmail's web interface to create the filter
and probably to create the folder to move Mr. wonderful's emails to.

That part of the plan worked. But I wanted to use alpine to copy the messages
to the offline folders I told her I'd keep on my computer until she decided
what she really wanted to do with the stuff.

I found the settings in her gmail account and enabled imap access.

I'd been using my opensuse Linux installation so I went ahead and created a
user account on that to set up her alpine in. And I did some web searching on
configuring imap clients to use gmail.

First thing I tried with alpine was defining a collection list via "msla" And
using this as a server setting: (except that I used her actual gmail address)

imap.gmail.com/ssl/novalidate-cert/user=handle-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org

It took a long time, but the connection timed out.

Next I tried the method I use on my gmx.com imap account and added an
incoming-folder. I noted that the web interface listed the INBOX as "Inbox" So
I tried:

gmail-inbox {imap.gmail.com:993/novalidate-cert/user=handle-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org/service=imap/ssl}Inbox,

When that too was unable to connect, I tried:

gmail-inbox {imap.gmail.com:993/novalidate-cert/user=handle-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org/service=imap/ssl}inbox,

Then Finally I tried it as:
gmail-inbox {imap.gmail.com:993/novalidate-cert/user=handle-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org/service=imap/ssl}INBOX,

But All I get is:
[Can't connect to gmail-imap.l.google.com,993: Connection timed out]

What am I doing wrong???

Re: conditional cursor positioning

Eduardo Chappa — 2013-05-11T21:39:12


Then maybe you should be adding _CURSORPOS_ at the beginning of your 
signature, besides putting your [X] signature at bottom.

Re: conditional cursor positioning

2013-05-11T10:06:34


I do use 'Signature at Bottom' but without _CURSORPOS_ as the first line in my signature the cursor is positioned just under the '----- Message Text -----' line for reply and on the 'To      :' for compose

Richard

Re: conditional cursor positioning

Eduardo Chappa — 2013-05-11T06:13:08


Have you tried not using _CURSORPOS_ and instead enabling

  [X]  Signature at Bottom

conditional cursor positioning

2013-05-10T21:18:32

I found in an older post that adding _CURSORPOS_ to my signature would get the cursor to jump to the bottom so as not to offend the anti-topposting people
Is there a way to get this to only jump to the bottom with reply and not with compose

Richard

Re: Composing - Cc required

2013-05-01T08:25:46


For example a filter configured to search for text containing:
"(from:me AND alpine-info< at >u.washington.edu) OR alpine-info< at >u.washington.edu"
... which labels the email with "alpine", will mean IMAP can see a
folder called alpine which will contain emails from that mailing list
which include your own sent emails which is what you wanted.

If you don't currently filter email to folders within gmail then as you
noted "All Mail" contains an inbox-a-like which contains all emails
including sent ones.

 - Damion

Re: Composing - Cc required

James Freer — 2013-04-30T19:34:53

Of course; yep that simple... i think i've only used bcc once or twice in the 
13/14 years i've been using email.

On the technical computing side i'm not that knowledgeable so i do appreciate 
your help [Dennis, Matt etal]. I will have to learn a bit more. To me Alpine is 
still by far the best email client and i think i've tried them all now.

#james

Re: Composing - Cc required

Matt Ackeret — 2013-04-30T18:36:26

(I've never really understood why people want to do this, but see many
people CCing themselves on mail..)

But can't you just set the default-fcc to be Inbox?

Re: Composing - Cc required

Dennis Davis — 2013-04-30T16:17:10


In which case it's probably using the Message-ID: for the duplicate
suppression.  It won't be alone in this.  The Cyrus IMAP server
can be configured to run with duplicate suppression.  It uses the
Message-ID: header for this.

Re: Composing - Cc required

Joseph Brennan — 2013-04-30T15:39:37


Gmail does duplicate suppression on all mail, so if the message is in Sent 
Mail it will not be duplicated in Inbox when it comes in. Yes of course the 
incoming copy will have additional Received headers and sometimes other 
changes made by the list software, but it is still considered a duplicate. 
Gmail is an odd mail server.

Joseph Brennan
Columbia University Information Technology

Re: Composing - Cc required

2013-04-30T15:28:22


This is an artifact of GMail's IMAP implementation.  You can create a
filter to a label like "inclusiveinbox" which matches on the listid of
the mailing list in question and includes from:me ORed into the mix.

Also make sure you've configured the delete/expunge settings to be
compatible with pine (alpine) rather than iphone (a significantly larger
proportion of imap traffic).  I.e. not to auto expunge on delete.

 - Damion