Correcting typos in addresses

[bob prohaska]

I have inadvertently made a few typos in addresses used in mutt,
and unfortunately it now remembers and uses them, usually at times
when I'm in a hurry and don't proofread the message closely.

I've looked at the man pages and can't figure out where they live
or how to evict them. I didn't do anything special to ask mutt to
remember addresses, it seems to be a default behavior. This is on
Mutt 1.5.24 (2015-08-30) running on FreeBSD-ARM (RPI2).

Can somebody give me a hint?

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

[Keith Thompson]

Post by bob prohaska
I have inadvertently made a few typos in addresses used in mutt,
and unfortunately it now remembers and uses them, usually at times
when I'm in a hurry and don't proofread the message closely.
I've looked at the man pages and can't figure out where they live
or how to evict them. I didn't do anything special to ask mutt to
remember addresses, it seems to be a default behavior. This is on
Mutt 1.5.24 (2015-08-30) running on FreeBSD-ARM (RPI2).
Can somebody give me a hint?

What exactly is it doing that tells you it's remembering addresses?

When I send a message on the command line, I type
mutt ***@example.com
and the shell doesn't do anything with the address (unless you
have some kind of autocompletion in your shell). If I use the 'm'
command from within mutt, it puts me into an editor where I can
fill in the "To: " line; again my editor (vim) doesn't know about
email addresses.

It will expand aliases if I save from the editor and then use 'e'
to re-edit, but as far as I know the only aliases it recognizes
are set from my .muttrc.

(I tried to use strace to find out what files it opens, but it hung
for some reason and didn't tell me anything useful.)

[bob prohaska]

Post by Keith Thompson

Post by bob prohaska
I have inadvertently made a few typos in addresses used in mutt,
and unfortunately it now remembers and uses them, usually at times
when I'm in a hurry and don't proofread the message closely.
I've looked at the man pages and can't figure out where they live
or how to evict them. I didn't do anything special to ask mutt to
remember addresses, it seems to be a default behavior. This is on
Mutt 1.5.24 (2015-08-30) running on FreeBSD-ARM (RPI2).
Can somebody give me a hint?

What exactly is it doing that tells you it's remembering addresses?

I had the firm impression that it was completing partial addresses
that I typed.

When I tried now to reproduce the effect, the most it would do

Post by Keith Thompson
When I send a message on the command line, I type
and the shell doesn't do anything with the address (unless you
have some kind of autocompletion in your shell). If I use the 'm'
command from within mutt, it puts me into an editor where I can
fill in the "To: " line; again my editor (vim) doesn't know about
email addresses.
It will expand aliases if I save from the editor and then use 'e'
to re-edit, but as far as I know the only aliases it recognizes
are set from my .muttrc.

There's no .muttrc in my home directory, and now that I try to reproduce
the problem I'm failing.

This is starting to look like a wetware problem....

Sorry!

bob prohaska

[Eef Hartman]

Post by bob prohaska
There's no .muttrc in my home directory,

Depending on the version of mutt there may be a .mutt OR a
.config/mutt directory INSIDE your home directory.
The config file then is in it, named muttrc without the leading .

And in /etc there can be a /etc/mutt directory too, the global
config in there is named Muttrc with an upper case M

[Eef Hartman]

Post by bob prohaska
Can somebody give me a hint?

The normal name is $HOME/.mutthistory, but look at the "historyfile"
setting in your global config for mutt (often /etc/Muttrc).
BTW: the number of history entries remembered is set there too.

History is stored by mutt in several different catagories (like E-mail
address, subject, etc).

[bob prohaska]

Post by Eef Hartman

Post by bob prohaska
Can somebody give me a hint?

The normal name is $HOME/.mutthistory, but look at the "historyfile"
setting in your global config for mutt (often /etc/Muttrc).
BTW: the number of history entries remembered is set there too.
History is stored by mutt in several different catagories (like E-mail
address, subject, etc).

There's nothing in my home directory, nor in /etc/, that appears related
to mutt. Moreover, when I try to reproduce the "error" I can't. When I type
a partial address that's what I get. Looks like the typos are fresh each
time......8-(

I'll watch more carefully, but I think this is operator error.


Apologies and thanks for reading!

bob prohaska

[Michael Uplawski]

On Sun, 24 Mar 2019 01:40:06 +0000 (UTC),

Post by bob prohaska
There's nothing in my home directory, nor in /etc/, that appears related
to mutt.

Before we start worrying about other things than address-completion, can
you confirm that you use other programs to fetch and send mail, like
exim for sending and fetchmail for fetching?

If not, i.e. if Mutt did all that for you, then the configuration has
been deleted in the meantime and you have work to do.

Cheerio.
- --
GnuPG brainpoolP512r1/5C2A258D 2015-10-02 [expires: 2018-09-28]
sub brainpoolP512r1/53461AFA 2015-10-02 [expires: 2018-09-28]

[bob prohaska]

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Hash: SHA512
On Sun, 24 Mar 2019 01:40:06 +0000 (UTC),

Post by bob prohaska
There's nothing in my home directory, nor in /etc/, that appears related
to mutt.

Before we start worrying about other things than address-completion, can
you confirm that you use other programs to fetch and send mail, like
exim for sending and fetchmail for fetching?
If not, i.e. if Mutt did all that for you, then the configuration has
been deleted in the meantime and you have work to do.

To back up a little, the system is FreeBSD 11.1-STABLE #0 r329611,
running on a Raspberry Pi 2B. The MTA is sendmail, in whatever state
the FreeBSD project supplies. No customization, it works out of the box.

I used (n)mh for years, but after migrating my home directory to the Pi
it turned out that nmh wouldn't compile from ports, so I tried mutt
(from the ports collection) and found that it worked perfectly and
was very easy to use. I didn't have to configure anything, it just
worked.

Eventually FreeBSD's nmh port started to compile on arm. I read and
send mail in mutt, periodically saving mail I want to keep using
nmh's inc command. Recent mail is handled with mutt, archived mail
with nmh.

Just for fun I ran
find / -name \*mutt\* -depth -print
as root. Lots of files with mutt in the name turned up, but
nothing that looks like an active config file appears. The
nearest misses are
usr/local/share/examples/mutt/sample.muttrc
/usr/local/share/examples/mutt/sample.muttrc-tlr

Is it possible for mutt to use (n)mh config files,
which _are_ present?

Thanks for reading!

bob prohaska