bug#20822: environment mangled by locale

[Andreas Rottmann]

John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:

> Can we configure this mailing list better?
>
> Many (all?) of the messages posted have no obvious indication of which
> mailing list they are coming from.
>
> The subject line is something like "bug#12345: description"
> The To: field is address@hidden
>
> In general, it takes a lot of detective work to discover that message
> relates to guile.
>
No, it doesn't, there's a List-Id header in all messages sent out via
the list:

List-Id: "Bug reports for GUILE, GNU's Ubiquitous Extension Language" 
<bug-guile.gnu.org>

You should use an email client (MUA) or mail delivery agent (MDA) which
can act on that header, and group all (e.g.) bug-guile mails into their
own folder (or view, or however your client calls that). Putting an
identifier into the subject just clutters the view for people who have
set up their email clients appropriatly for use with mailing list.

>From the email headers of your post, it seems you use mutt; I don't know
if mutt has built-in support for grouping based on List-Id (I'd guess
no), but you can use a tool (MDA) like "maildrop"[1], "scmail"[2] or
"procmail"[3]" to automatically put the email you receive via mailing
lists into different (e.g.) IMAP mailboxes.

[1] http://www.courier-mta.org/maildrop/
[2] http://0xcc.net/scmail/index.html.en
[3] http://www.procmail.org/

Personally, I use scmail, as I quite like its Scheme-based configuration
file format; here's what I've done on a Debian system to set this up
(I'm hopefully not forgetting something here):

Create a .forward file containing the following single line in your
$HOME, to process incoming mail with scmail:

| /usr/bin/scmail-deliver

Then, follow the instructions on the scmail homepage[1], creating
~/.scmail/config and ~/.scmail/deliver-rules to split your incoming mail
into multiple mailboxes; I use the following rules for the Guile lists:

(add-filter-rule!
  '(list-id (#/guile-devel\.gnu\.org/i "lists/guile-devel"))
  '(list-id (#/guile-user\.gnu\.org/i "lists/guile-user"))
  '(list-id (#/bug-guile\.gnu\.org/i "lists/guile-bug")))

The exact destinations you can use (e.g. "lists/guile-devel") depends on
which program access your mail (IMAP server, local MUA). For a mutt
instance running on the same system, my config looks like [4]. Note that
this config is not polished at all; I use mutt on the server only as a
fallback.

[4] http://rotty.xx.vu/git/dotfiles/mutt/tree/.muttrc

> Can it not be configured to Prepend the Subject: line with Bug-Guile
> or something similar?  That way it'd be easier to manage - either
> manually or automatically.
>
As mentioned above, this is not a good idea.

Kind regards, Rotty
-- 
Andreas Rottmann -- <http://rotty.xx.vu/>