muttlearn

In mutt, if want you use multiple sending profiles, you typically create different config files for each profile, and then switch between them by a macro, some program like muttprofile or based on recipient (send-hook) or current folder (folder-hook).

I had different problems with these approaches (mostly due to my laziness):

• I forgot to switch between the profiles (muttprofile).
• I'm not always in my university mailbox when I want to write mail from my university profile (folder-hooks).
• I manually carefully had to administer the list of send-hooks, always adding new hooks for new people (send-hooks).

That's why I wrote the small python program muttlearn, which scans mailboxes that contain outgoing mail, and automatically generates send-hooks. There aren't distinct profiles anymore, but it is learned how you want to write mails based on your prior written emails. Currently, these properties can be learned/generated for a recipient or a group of recipients:

• Sender identity (From): $from and $realname or my_hdr
• Signature: $signature
• Send charset: $send_charset
• Locale (using guess_language), which can be used to activate proper spell checking or $attribution and $date_format.
• Message template (greeting and goodbye message), currently only if you use vim as editor. E.g.:

  Hey Bob,
  
  Regards,
  Alice

• Crypto settings (they are not learned from the messages, but from the PGP or S/MIME key store using PyMe): $crypt_autoencrypt, $smime_is_default, $smime_default_key, $pgp_sign_as.

Of course, all this behavior can be customized / switched off partly in the configuration file! Also, muttlearn and the config-file based profiles are not mutually exclusive, they can be used concurrently!

Download

Just get the source from the git repository on github:

git clone https://github.com/weisslj/muttlearn.git

Installation

optional (but recommended) dependencies: guess_language, PyMe

for python >= 2.6

python setup.py install --user
export PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin

You can also use --prefix but you may need to adapt PYTHONPATH in this case.

for python 2.5:

python setup.py install --prefix ~/.local
export PYTHONPATH=~/.local/lib/python2.5/site-packages
export PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin

For removal, just delete all installed files, e.g.:

rm -rvf ~/.local/bin/muttlearn ~/.local/lib/python*/*-packages/muttlearn*

Usage

1. Create a configuration file, either by starting muttlearn or by copying the documented version from doc/ to ~/.muttlearnrc. The most important settings are mailboxes and $output_file.
2. Make sure your mutt config has alternates correctly set up.
3. Run muttlearn:

   muttlearn --verbose --progress

4. Include the generated output file in your ~/.muttrc, for example by appending this line at the bottom:

   source ~/.mutt/automatic-send-hooks

Hints

• Like with any send-hooks, runtime changes to the generated variables are overridden. If you want to change e.g. $editor during runtime, change $my_default_editor instead!
• The age of the messages plays an important role. The newer the message, the more it counts for learning. You can control this behaviour with $weight_formula or $max_age variables.
• muttlearn parses your ~/.muttrc for some variables. All these variables (mutt_defaults in config.py) can also be set in the muttlearn config!

Future

• Learn mails at runtime! Difficult in mutt, extensions like in Thunderbird would be great...
• After the first computer passes the Turing test: also generate the body of the messages, would make life so much easier :-)! Seriously though: if someone writes something funny using chat-bots etc., I'm willing to include that!