Hi.

I am looking for a command-line mail tool that can read the e-mail messages stored in the KMail "Mail" directory. I need a tool like that because I often access my Linux box at home from my work via ssh. Because of the corporate firewall, I cannot redirect the X display of my home machine back to my work machine.

So... I would like to read my personal mail on my home machine without using KMail. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

TIA,
Dai

You'll probably get a lot of posts about the virtues of mutt, but found mutt difficult to use. In particular, mutt lacks a built-in SMTP service, so you need to install and configure separate SMTP software in order to merely send email.

May I suggest a more user-friendly alternative: elmo.

Elmo is a console email client, with a conventional Eudora/Outlook interface (mail folders on the left, headers on the right). It has built-in POP3 and SMTP support. Elmo is also way easier to configure than mutt.

One caveat: you will need to know whether your mail is in mbox (all your mail is kept in a single monolithic file) or maildir format (each message is a separate text file in your Mail directory hierarchy). My mail is in maildir format, and I can verify that elmo works perfectly well with that.

Thanks a lot for the info. I just installed elmo. Looks pretty good... the configuration program (elmoconf.pl) makes the job manageable, and my KMail mailbox (which is in maildir format) seems to work fine with it.

One question I have, though... how do you open the actual messages? I can hit "F" to go to the fetched messages and <page-up>/<page-down> to go between the messages, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to open and read an individual message. The help section says to hit <ENTER>, but that does nothing for me. Am I missing something?

Thanks,
Dai

Try using TAB to change the focus from the folder pane to the header pane (and vice versa), use up/down arrows to select message header, then press ENTER