Beep Beep - Administration

A bunch of other miscellaneous variables and functions keep things interesting. Here's a quick list:

You can force Mutt to append a particular host name to every unqualified email address (handy if most of your mail is to users on the same domain) with the "hostname" variable.

set hostname="melonfire.com"        # attach default hostname

You can tell Mutt to check for new email at periodic intervals with the "mail_check" and "timeout" variables,

set mail_check=60                  # check mail every 60 seconds
set timeout=30                     # 30 seconds inactivity before checking
mail

and have it let you know with a beep.

set beep_new                        # beep if new mail comes in

By default, Mutt only checks your mail spool for new mail. In case you have an agent running in the background and filtering your email into different mailboxes - think procmail - then this feature isn't going to be all that useful to you. Which is why Mutt also allows you to specify a list of additional mailboxes it can check for new mail.

mailboxes =lists/melonfire-dev       # mailboxes which get new mail
mailboxes =irc-friends

In case you have multiple email addresses, you can use the "alternates" variable to let Mutt know about them. This helps the program to identify which messages are addressed to you, and display status flags accordingly.

set alternates="\^(\
(icarus@somehost\\.com)\
|(i@someotherhost\\.com)\
)$"                                 # these are all my addresses

You can alter the "From: " field on every email message sent out with the "from" variable,

set from="The Geek Prince <g@somehost.com>"   # reset From: field to this

and add custom headers to your email with the "my_hdr" command.

my_hdr Weather: Cloudy with prospects of rain                 # custom
header



my_hdr Web_Ad: Visit us online at http://www.melonfire.com/   # custom
header

And, in the same vein, you can have Mutt automatically attach a "User-Agent:" header identifying itself to every message you send out.

set user_agent                       # add User-Agent: header

>>> More Site Administration Articles          >>> More By Vikram Vaswani, (c) Melonfire

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