asynchronous replies in mutt

David Woodhouse talks about Jack's rethorical post "why did we ever abandon Mutt and Pine?", and says he still uses pine on handheld devices. His second of two main reasons for defecting to Evolution is:

Secondly, I very much like composing new email in separate windows, rather than in the main mail reader window. I have habit of hitting 'reply', perhaps making a half-hearted attempt to respond to an email, and then getting distracted and leaving it for days before I eventually find it the composer window on my desktop again, finish it off and send it. If I didn't do that, then stuff would just get lost and I'd never reply to it.

Well, I'm a commited mutt user and I have a similar problem with replies; I often defer then because I can't do them justice right now, and never return. The message gets buried.

There was a recent thread in the mutt lists on started by Jamie Rollins on "pseudo multi-threading", wanting to dispatch mail composition in a separate window. There turn out to be a few people who do things like that, and a few scripts.

For myself, I don't want a separate window. I want always to start in-line with my reply, but perhaps abandon it and resume later. So... screen! Now I have a script called muttedit that I use as the mail editor; my .muttrc now says "set editor=muttedit". It copies the temp file mutt makes and runs screen, invoking "mutt -H" with the copy. If I complete the reply and quit, I'm still in my original mutt as if I had used a plain editor. To defer it, detach from screen. I'm back in mutt, and there a screen session lying around holding the pending reply. Muttedit takes a bit of care to give the screen session a nice fat title with the reply subject in it.

We'll see how it goes.