Ygtjki

Description of the issue

I'm in a terminal at least half the time and, while doing e-mail, that mostly means being ssh'd into a remote machine where I run the alpine e-mail client to check my various imap accounts. I don't get very many e-mail attachments and honestly don't want many: for me, e-mail remains a largely text-based affair. But it does happen from time to time that I get one, and in those cases I need either to go physically to where that machine is located in order to view the attachment, or I need to fire up a graphical browser and go to the site's webmail interface to view it. Neither of those are very desirable options.

A possible solution

I've come up with a more workable solution that that involves running mutt (non-static installation) episodically on the local machine and using it for viewing e-mail attachments. I'd like to solicit here improvements and/or alternative solutions. My script looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
# create temporary ~/.muttrc and echo into it a line that will cause mail to be sorted from most recent first
touch ~/.muttrc
echo "set sort = reverse-date-received" >~/.muttrc
# make the ~/Mail directory so mutt won't prompt asking whether or not to create it
mkdir -p ~/Mail
# prompt for gmail user name and read that value into a variable to be used when invoking mutt
echo Please enter the username of the gmail account to be checked:
read username
mutt -f "imaps://$username@imap.gmail.com/INBOX"
# remove ~/Mail since it's otherwise not needed on this system
rm -rf ~/Mail
# now remove the temporary .muttrc
rm ~/.muttrc

When I receive an e-mail that has an attachment I'd like to view, I run that script on the local machine and view the target message and--via the agency of configurations already in place on the local machine--its attachment.

I believe the in-line comments make pretty clear the rather simplistic workings of this solution. The major drawback to this solution is that, since I have a few thousand e-mails in my account, it takes some minutes for mutt to load them all. In almost all instances, what I'd rather have happen is for only about the 20 or so most recent e-mails to be loaded. But so far as I can tell, unless a more static installation of mutt and associated files is made, that is not possible.

Further questions, solicitation of input

So, can anyone suggest improvements to my script of any sort, whether that be proposals for restricting the number of messages downloaded or any other enhancement? Have I overlooked other utilities that may allow me to accomplish this task? I believe telnet can still be used for checking e-mail, but that is not a desirable solution for various reasons: telnet is insecure, it seems there is not an easy way to identify target e-mails, and since it is not integrated with the system's automated file handling abilities (through use of configuration files like mime-types and mailcap) viewing attachments would not be at all straightforward.

Further thoughts. I know I could, for example, forward X through an ssh tunnel so as to, essentially, view attachments using the alpine client that runs on the remote computer. But forwarding X like that is kind of tricky and, so far as I understand it, is considered a security risk. Add to that the fact that I'm currently having problems (related to a recent migration) viewing attachments on that machine anyway, and forwarding X does not seem like the right solution.

NOTE: As should be clear there are some gotchas in my script that could seriously mess up a static mutt installation--like creating and removing ~/Mail and .muttrc. Anyone trying to appropriate this solution to their own needs should therefore proceed with caution.

LATER EDIT: I've managed to speed up the loading of those thousands of e-mails by just slightly fleshing out my skeletal mutt installation. It turns out that if I set up a local directory where mutt can cache e-mail headers, then stipulate it's location in a local .muttrc configuration file (as opposed to creating said file on the fly, as in my original directives), the loading of those thousands of e-mails goes a lot more quickly. So the content of a static .muttrc would look something like

set sort = reverse-date-received"
set header_cache = "/home/user/tmp/mutt-tmp"

(mutt-tmp being the name of the directory where e-mail headers will be cached), while the "touch," "echo," and "rm ~/.muttrc" lines should be commented out and the line for invoking mutt in the script I listed should be changed to something like mutt -F /home/user/local-muttrc -f "imaps://$username@imap.gmail.com/INBOX"