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Using other apps with meli

Sending mail with a command line tool

composing.send_mail can use either settings for an SMTP server or a shell command to which it pipes new mail to.

msmtp and send_mail

msmtp is a command line SMTP client that can be configured to work with many SMTP servers. It supports queuing and other small useful features. See the documentation.

[composing]
send_mail = 'msmtp --logfile=/home/user/.mail/msmtp.log --read-recipients 
--read-envelope-from'

Editor

Any editor you specify in composing.editor_cmd will be invoked with the e-mail draft file path appended as an argument to it. For example, if your setting is editor_cmd = 'nano', meli will execute nano /tmp/meli/....

Configuration

vim / neovim command

The following command setting in your meli configuration file makes editing start at the first empty line, that is, after the e-mail headers. This allows you to start writing the e-mail body right away after opening the editor from meli.

[composing]
editor_cmd = '~/.local/bin/vim +/^$'

In vim, the + argument positions the cursor at the first file argument. / specifies a pattern position instead of a line number. ^ specifies the start of a line, and $ the end of the line. The pattern altogether matches an empty line, which will be after the e-mail headers.

Composing with format=flowed

format=flowed is a proposed IETF standard[^formatflowed] that lets you preserve the structure of paragraphs by disambiguating a hard and a soft line break. A line break that is preceded by a space character is soft and does not terminate the paragraph, while a line break without a space is a hard one and creates a new paragraph. This allows text to be re-flowed in e-mail clients at different display widths and font sizes without messing up the author's formatting.

vim / neovim and format=flowed

Create a mail.vim file type plugin in:

  • $HOME/.vim/after/ftplugin/mail.vim for vim
  • $HOME/.config/nvim/after/ftplugin/mail.vim for neovim
setlocal nomodeline
setlocal textwidth=72
setlocal formatoptions=aqtw2r
setlocal nojoinspaces
setlocal nosmartindent
setlocal comments+=nb:>
match ErrorMsg '\s\+$'

Also, don't forget that you can easily quote stuff with MailQuote. From :help ft-mail-plugin:

Local mappings: <LocalLeader>q or \\MailQuote Quotes the text selected in Visual mode, or from the cursor position to the end of the file in Normal mode. This means "> " is inserted in each line.

See the accompanying mail.vim for comments for each setting.

xbiff

xbiff(1) manual page says:1

The xbiff program displays a little image of a mailbox. When there is no mail, the flag on the mailbox is down. When mail arrives, the flag goes up and the mailbox beeps.

This tool is very outdated, but some users might still have use for it. Therefore meli provides support (also, it's easy to support this feature).

Specify a file path in notifications.xbiff_file_path and meli will write to it when new mail arrives. This file can the be used as input to xbiff.

[notifications]
xbiff_file_path = "/tmp/xbiff"

Viewing HTML e-mail

By default meli tries to render HTML e-mail with w3m. You can override this by setting the pager.html_filter setting. The default setting corresponds to:

[pager]
html_filter = "w3m -I utf-8 -T text/html"

The HTML of the e-mail is piped into html_filter's standard input.

Externally refreshing e-mail accounts

If your account's syncing is handled by an external tool, you can use the refresh shortcuts within meli to call this tool with accounts.refresh_command.