Using Mblaze

So you followed my last tutorial on setting up mblaze and friend’s for you mail management, but now you are left just looking at it not understanding how to use the power you have been given now. So now I’m going to teach you some basic usage that you can have with it.

Helper function’s

I guess you haven’t read my other blog on setting up mblaze and friend’s if you need me to type them out here again, so go read it now! Here is the link.

Getting mail and reading it

Now after you have actually read my last blog and got the two function’s and the script installed and made them usefull, we can start getting and reading our mail.

First you will choose what mail you wanna manage, or how I call it profile with my script.

After choosing it you will now have to choose if you wan’t to see all mail available on the server, or you will be just reading the new mail and based on that run either mall or mnew.

Now we have a couple way’s of listing and reading mail.

We can use the command mscan that will show you simple one line summaries of your mail. The mail with . mean their status is undread.

To read a single specific message we can use mshow. By default it will use the mail that when using mscan show’s > as currently choosen mail. To read another mail you can choose the number of the mail from mscan and use mshow like this mshow N ( N being the number of the mail you wan’t to read ).

Now onto my favourite way of reading mail with mblaze, it’s mless. You just run it and it will run a less instance showing all your mail, and have the ability to change between them with keybindings :p and :n with p going to preview and n going to next message.

Settings read status

To flag mail as read we can use the mflag utiity. We do it by choosing what mail we wanna mark as read and running the command mflag -S N, but after that we need to fix our list because the filename changed because of the fact that we changed the flag to read. To fix that we will run mseq -f : | mseq -S.

We can easily alias this sequence of command’s into a function to streamline this.

function mread() {
    mflag -S $1
    mseq -f : | mseq -S
}

You can place this function anywhere in your shell configuration.

Sending mail

To write mail with mblaze we use command called mcom. After running it, it will a file in your editor of choice that looks like this:

To: 
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Subject: 
From: John Doe <john@doe.com>
Message-Id: <random-id>
User-Agent: mblaze/...

In the To: file you write the name of mail you wan’t to send to for example Shit Shittington <shit@shittington.com> and subject to name of the subject like regular mail.

After that you type the message in the last empty line at the bottom, of course you can make it as long as you wan’t to.

If you save the message as draft just run mcom -r. To reply to a message use mrep N to reply to a specific message.

Extending mless functionalitty

We can extend the functionality of mless a bit by creating a file with custom keybindings that will go ahead and a few more function’s to mless.

Save this file to ~/.mblaze/mlesskey

Q quit \1
:cq quit \1
[ prev-file
] next-file
{ noaction E1\n
} quit $
$ quit $
S noaction E//scan\n
` noaction E\#\n
H quit H
N quit N
R quit R
K quit k
d quit d
\^ quit \^

This will add keybindings like ] and [ for previous and next mail and d for setting read status on mail. Rest you can checkout yourself by looking at this part of mless script on github, link.

Conclusion

I guess this is it now, hope this help’s you on making your own mail be even more amazing.