If I told you that you suffer from MEAD you might think (if you are an anthropologist like me) that you suffer from an obsession with a plump anthropologist of said name who popularized the discipline bringing home tales of Samoan teenagers who did not seem to suffer from the angst and anxiety of their American counterpart. Or you might think MASSIVE EMAIL ANXIETY DISORDER, which is a DSM diagnosis I invented last week and thus have minimized the work that the American Psychiatric Association will have to put into updating their DSM (you re welcome). So I have penned down its major characteristics and effects so that you too can identify with some other inner pathology that might mark your daily life and being (you re welcome)

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association currently defines Massive Email Anxiety Disorder (MEAD) disorder in the following way. Please note that while this definition of MEAD is the most definitive and clearly produced to date, there are several potential problems with this definition that will hopefully be addressed by the task forces, editors, and research coordinators of the association as time progresses. The Current DSM-IV Definition (Abridged): A. A persistent fear of one or more emails situations in which an author of an email worries about the status of a sent email. The individual fears that the tone or content of a message was misinterpreted or that an email never arrived to its correct destination. Alternatively, they worry excessively about why they have not received a response. B. Exposure to the feared situation almost invariably provokes anxiety, which may take the form of a situationally bound or situationally pre-disposed Panic Attack. C. The person recognizes that this fear is unreasonable or excessive. D. The feared situations are avoided or else are endured with intense anxiety and distress. Alternatively the person suffering from MEAD shuffles over to their partner or office-mate to talk (obsessively) about the nature and possible effect of the email, sometimes for hours, sometimes even for days. E. The avoidance, anxious anticipation, or distress in writing email, which interferes significantly with the person s normal routine, occupational (academic) functioning, or social activities or relationships, or there is marked distress about having the phobia. F. In individuals under age 18 years, the duration is at least 6 months. G. The fear or avoidance is not due to direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., drugs, medications) or a general medical condition not better accounted for by another mental disorder. Problems with the DSM Definition of Massive Email Anxiety Disorder While this definition is clearly the most definitive and precise official definition produced so far, Massive Email Anxiety Disorder has only been officially recognized since 2020, and the problem did not become adequately explained until the 2015 version of the DSM. Thus, the definition of MEAD disorder is becoming clearer and more precise with each edition.

Written in honor of current revisions for the DSM, expected to be published in 2013

Apparently, there s some hype in the Ubuntu community about Ruby 1.9.2, so let s clarify: it would be totally irresponsible to try to ship Ruby 1.9.2 in Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu Lucid. Ruby 1.9.2 has not been released yet:

• June 2009: The release schedule for 1.9.2 was announced
• mid-July 2009: Ruby 1.9.2 preview 1 was released
• September 2009: 1.9.2 preview 2 was tagged in SVN, but not announced
• September 2009: The release plans were cancelled
• October 2009: A meeting was announced to discussed new release plans, but I don t think that the outcome was made public
• Ruby 1.9.2 has not been branched off trunk yet

That s where we stand now. Even if surprises are possible, it s very unlikely that Ruby 1.9.2 will be released before Lucid s release (or, what the real requirement is, before Lucid s freeze). So we are sticking with 1.8.7 and 1.9.1 (1.9.0 will go away before the release). If you can point to specific commits that fix real bugs in 1.9.1, and could be backported to the Debian package, feel free to notify the Debian Ruby maintainers.

When users upgrade Firefox, they are shown a special web page after restart. As this was obviously very Firefox oriented, this was disabled in Iceweasel. Until a week ago. A week ago, I created a (quite raw) web page that users of Iceweasel 3.5.6-2 would see after they install or upgrade. The idea behind this page was suggested by Moritz Muehlenhoff during my BoF at DebConf 9, and consisted of displaying a call for help message in a splash screen. What most looked like this in Iceweasel is the Firefox feature mentioned above. I unfortunately wasn t able to implement it until now. So, a week after these pages were put online and Iceweasel 3.5.6-2 was uploaded, even though I can t say it s a huge success, it at least led to some movement: More than 12000 users (still growing) saw the pages, out of which almost 1800 (roughly 15%) followed the link for a new logo. While there was no contribution for a new logo yet, there has already been several translations contributions for the web pages, in german, spanish and italian. Next iceweasel upload will consequently send users to a localized version of the web page when it exists. The server logs also allow to have some figures on the usage of localized versions of Iceweasel, but as this is based on user agent strings, it is not totally accurate, though somehow interesting:

1. english: 58.3%
2. german: 15.2%
3. french: 7.9%
4. spanish: 3.8%
5. italian: 2.7%
6. polish: 2.5%
7. japanese: 2.2%
8. russian: 2.1%
9. portuguese: 1%
10. czech: 0.6%

Another interesting figure is that apparently 2.4% of users haven t upgraded xulrunner-1.9.1 and are not using version 1.9.1.6 with their Iceweasel 3.5.6. I m afraid of what this can mean for stable security updates, although, as being security updates, they may be followed better. Somewhere around 7% of users have, at some point, changed their user agent string to include Firefox in it, because web sites suck. This is a very interesting figure because despite that being quite significant, we haven t got that many complaints (I m not saying there weren t, but I would have expected more, considering the amount of users involved). Fortunately, this was changed recently, so all these users could reset their user agent string. And last but not least, except amd64 and x86 users, we saw 14 powerpc users and 7 arm users.

The meeting agenda is already posted for tonight s (Wednesday s) SPI board IRC meeting which will be at 2000 UTC (an hour earlier than last month, back at usual time). It s another pretty lean meeting and I don t know why. Last month s comments suggested SPI needs better marketing, which has come up in the comments here before. There s a wish to switch the SPI website to git and ikiwiki which would allow more members to contribute. As I understand it, anyone can set up the git repository and ikiwiki, then announce it to spi-general (or spi-www) and start to port the website. I ll probably get there eventually (after porting Cooperatives-SW and NSCycle websites to django), but if you have a bit of time and would like to help this democratic free and open source software charity, please beat me to starting and tell me where to find your work!

It took some time since last Photo uploader release, but here is yet another release to fix upload to imageshack.

Want a sound card? Want a cleared sound that is not contaminated by electromagnetic interference in you computer s case? Want that all to work in Linux? I did. So I got me one of theseUSB sound cards. It arrived today in a tiny padded envelope. And it works with Linux. Just plug and play. PulseAudio makes it all trivial. The device ID as reported by lsusb is 0c76:1607 JMTek, LLC. The text on the back of the device says Model HY544 USB 3D Sound Pnp FC CE Made in China .

I found out yesterday that my university s Microsoft Exchange Server account stopped forwarding my mail on 8 December 2009. As a result, mail accumulated there and remained unseen. Dear examiners, paper authors, supervisors, sponsors, participants, and peers who responded to my calls and cries related to my PhD thesis. I am terribly sorry that you were subjected to this. You replied usually within a few days, but I still sent you reminder after reminder in the weeks to follow. You must have thought that I was a real dork. Please forgive me. I really appreciate your patience! I filed a ticket with my university s IT service provider, which got closed the next day with it should now work again . That wasn t going to cut it for me, so I reopened the ticket, asking for an explanation. Next, I received an apology with a bit of speculation. After a bit of research, it seems that the reason was to be found in the inconsistency of being an external staff member (i.e. an e-mail address outside of the Active Directory domain), but still having an account on the server. On 8 December 2009, the server was upgraded with a service pack. This caused Exchange to go a little manic on the housekeeping. After all, why would anyone ever want to forward their e-mail elsewhere, and still have an account? Well, I certainly don t want an account, and yet I have to have one: Microsoft has bought their ways into the university and spread their germs all across, I need credentials to be able to access shared files, print, browse the library, or search the phone book. However, considering that UL s Outlook Web Access instance does not let users of decent browsers search their mailboxes (a premium feature reserved for users of Internet Exploder), one cannot manipulate more than a page-full of e-mails at a time, bounce messages, or do many of the other operations that make dealing with large amounts of e-mail possible, and because Exchange mail if it doesn t get lost in the first place sucks in so many other ways, I certainly prefer my mail to be handled by a real mail server with a proper mail filter (writeup in progress). Maybe the Exchange service pack was simply designed to get rid of outcasts like me who don t buy into the low-Microsoft-quality vendor lock-in? We ll never know, thanks to the proprietarity of their software (and the fact that the university service provider apparently does not keep logs of changes). NP: AC/DC: Back in Black

Working on some document today, it occurred to me, once again, that OpenOffice's method for designing and applying documents styling totally sucks! Granted, this was not the first time that I cam to this conclusion but, today, I've come to realize that OpenOffice's paradigms constantly make me waste time trying to form a mental image of how every style element is suppose to relate to the other one, yet without having the full picture available within a single, easy-to-read document. Also, there is a complete lack of consistency in how style elements work. Some want to be defined in millimeters, while others want to be defined in points, while other still in number of lines. What a mess! In short: to become remotely usable, OpenOffice needs to approach document styling via the "HTML document with a separate CSS style sheet" paradigm. In other words, I need to be able to edit styles globally, as a group and separately from the document content itself, rather than having to click my way through a multitude of dialogs, for each and every type of text elements. To compare this with web design, there, I can focus on the actual content, formatted around semantic text elements (headers, paragraphs, block quotes, etc.) and then decide on the presentation styling as a separate global process by attaching a CSS style sheet, in which the relation between each type of text element and how it will be displayed is crystal clear, because it's handled as a unified style editing process. I think that this is one area in which Free Software could innovate in a positive way, by distancing itself from the Redmondesque practices of Microsoft Word, from which OpenOffice borrows too much. How about having a proper Style Editor application (similar to a CSS editor), within the OpenOffice suite, while Open Writer itself would only be allowed to load the style sheets produced by it and to apply them to semantic text text elements?

I ve just put the slides of my talk on Debian and Ubuntu online. Don t hesitate to post comments to ask for clarifications where needed (it might be difficult to understand some parts of the slides without being in the room). Clarifications:

• In slide 15, I wrote that Ubuntu had a newer X. During the presentation, I think I said that I wasn t sure if it was still the case. Indeed, it s no longer the case (and hasn t been for a long time ; Ubuntu has been mostly following Debian for X). I apparently remembered a change a long time ago that was picked by Ubuntu from the Debian X svn/git (xlibs-dev removal, I think), and that caused a number of FTBFS in Ubuntu. However, clearly, the best example of such changes made first in Ubuntu are newer GCC versions.

This has robbed me of several days of my life, so I want to bring Google juice this this problem. IF you have a Pylons or TurboGears application or anything else that uses the fantastic EvalException WSGI middleware for web debugging of you web program and have the following symptom: * on a crash the traceback page shows up, but it has no css style and no images
* http://127.0.0.1:5000/_debug/media/plus.jpg returns a 404 (where 127.0.0.1:5000 is the path of your application) with Nothing could be found to match _debug The problem that you are facing in this case is the enviroment variable PYTHONOPTIMIZE or apache_wsgi option WSGIPythonOptimize. Unset them both or you debug environment will not work!

I envisioned to write a happy blog post how we managed to finally release Debian Edu 5.0.4+edu0...

Something I was really proud about and which I will probably be proud again one day.

For now I can just say, that I now have learned that proper release management needs to include release announcement release management.

Oh well. Hope you enjoy Debian Edu 5.0.4+edu0!

A new release of our Rcpp R / C++ interface classes is now out, the version number is 0.7.5. It comes on the heels of the release 0.7.4 and keeps with our semi-frantic schedule of releases every ten or so days going. The package is now on CRAN and Debian, and mirrors start to get the new versions. As before, my local page provides more details and Romain's blog is always worth watching too. The changes are summarised below in the NEWS file snippet, more details are in the ChangeLog as well.

0.7.5	2010-02-08
    o 	wrap has been much improved. wrappable types now are :
    	- primitive types : int, double, Rbyte, Rcomplex, float, bool
    	- std::string
    	- STL containers which have iterators over wrappable types:
    	  (e.g. std::vector<t>, std::deque<t>, std::list<t>, etc ...). 
    	- STL maps keyed by std::string, e.g std::map<std::string>
    	- classes that have implicit conversion to SEXP
    	- classes for which the wrap template if fully or partly specialized
    	This allows composition, so for example this class is wrappable: 
    	std::vector< std::map<std::string> > (if T is wrappable)
    	
    o 	The range based version of wrap is now exposed at the Rcpp::
    	level with the following interface : 
    	Rcpp::wrap( InputIterator first, InputIterator last )
    	This is dispatched internally to the most appropriate implementation
    	using traits
    o	a new namespace Rcpp::traits has been added to host the various
    	type traits used by wrap
    o 	The doxygen documentation now shows the examples
    o 	A new file inst/THANKS acknowledges the kind help we got from others
    o	The RcppSexp has been removed from the library.
    
    o 	The methods RObject::asFoo are deprecated and will be removed
    	in the next version. The alternative is to use as<foo>.
    o	The method RObject::slot can now be used to get or set the 
    	associated slot. This is one more example of the proxy pattern
    	
    o	Rcpp::VectorBase gains a names() method that allows getting/setting
    	the names of a vector. This is yet another example of the 
    	proxy pattern.
    	
    o	Rcpp::DottedPair gains templated operator<< and operator>> that 
    	allow wrap and push_back or wrap and push_front of an object
    	
    o	Rcpp::DottedPair, Rcpp::Language, Rcpp::Pairlist are less
    	dependent on C++0x features. They gain constructors with up
    	to 5 templated arguments. 5 was choosed arbitrarily and might 
    	be updated upon request.
    	
    o	function calls by the Rcpp::Function class is less dependent
    	on C++0x. It is now possible to call a function with up to 
    	5 templated arguments (candidate for implicit wrap)
    	
    o	added support for 64-bit Windows (thanks to Brian Ripley and Uwe Ligges)

As always, even fuller details are in the ChangeLog on the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page

Over the last few days I ve got this blog and my documents blog to conform to valid XHTML according to the W3C validation service [1]. One significant change that I made was to use lower-case for HTML tags. For about 15 years I ve been using capitals for tags to make them stand out from content and my blogs are the latest in a long line of web sites with that. Naturally I wasn t going to correct 900 posts manually so I ran a series of SQL commands such as the following on my database server (where X is the Wordpress table prefix): update X_wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content,'<PRE>','<pre>'); But make sure you have a good backup of your database before running SQL search and replace commands on your blog data. After running such commands about 90% of my blog posts conformed, so I only needed to edit about 90 posts to correct things. This process gave some real benefits. One issue is that an apostrophe in a URL must be quoted, otherwise some browsers will link to the desired URL and some will link to a truncated URL. Fixing a couple of variations of this problem resulted in some broken links being fixed. Another issue is that you can t have paragraphs (<p> tags) within list items, fixing this made some of my posts align correctly it was a tricky fix, in some cases I had to use <br/> to break up text in a list item and sometimes I replaced lists with different sections delimited by <h3> headings (which apparently is rumored to give better SEO). It would make a really nice Wordpress feature to be able to do W3C validation as part of the publishing process, ideally an attempt to publish or schedule a post would result in a message saying saved as a draft because it s not valid XHTML if the checks failed. The source to the W3C validation software is significantly larger than Wordpress [2], but it seems to me that there are two main types of Wordpress installations, small ones for personal use (which tend to be on fairly idle servers) and big ones that have so much traffic that the resource usage of validation would be nothing compared to the ongoing load. As there seems to be no way of validating my posts before publication my best option is the W3C button I now have on my blog. This allows me to validate the page at a click so while I can t entirely avoid the risk of publishing a post with invalid XHTML I can at least fix it rapidly enough that hardly anyone will notice. It also seems like a useful feature to have aggregators like Venus [3] check for valid HTML and not display posts unless they are valid. It s not a feature that could be enabled immediately (I m sure that if you click on this link to the W3C validation service [1] from a Planet feed you will see lots of errors and warnings), but once bloggers have time to fix their installation it would allow preventing some of the common annoyances of Planet installations. It s not uncommon on popular Planets to have unmatched tags in a post which results in significant amounts of the content being bold, underlined, in italics, or for the greatest annoyance struck-out. I know that this may be a controversial suggestion, but please consider why you are blogging if you are blogging for the benefit of your readers (which seems to be the case for everyone other than sploggers) then it seems that the readers will benefit more by not having a broken post syndicated than they would benefit from having it syndicated and thus messing up the display of many following posts. The next thing on my todo list in this regard is to do some tests of accessibility. The work that I have done to pass the XHTML validation tests has helped to some degree if nothing else the images now all have alt= descriptions, but I expect that it will be a lot of work. The Wordpress Codex has a page about accessibility, I haven t read all of it yet [4]. Does anyone have any recommendations for free automated systems that check web sites for accessibility? What would be ideal is a service that allows different levels of warnings, so instead of trying to fix all problems at once I could start by quickly fixing the most serious problems on the most popular posts and finish the job at some later date.

• [1] http://validator.w3.org/
• [2] http://validator.w3.org/source/
• [3] http://intertwingly.net/code/venus/
• [4] http://codex.wordpress.org/Accessibility

RCBW - #20 With a couple of days of delay, here are this last week squashes, by yours truly:

• bug #567767 - nxml-mode - request removal, integrated into emacs23
• bug #546764 - d-feet - add missing dep on hicolor-icon-theme
• bug #566290 - php-wikidiff2 - add missing dep/substvar on phpapi-*
• bug #567860 - php-net-ping - sponsored fix (+ upstream release) for DM maintainer
• bug #248275 - anteater - proposed removal
• bug #536285 - mirage - avoid tricking users to delete the wrong file (patch by Evgeni Golov)

The delay is due to FOSDEM, it's hard to squash bugs when you are: (1) having fun (best FOSDEM ever, if you ask me), (2) connected with very poor network connectivity (let's say: FOSDEM-quality network). Also, there are just 6 squashes, but last week there were 8, so ... (I know, I suck). Among the main highlights of the week, I just want to cite Mehdi Dogguy: he was with me at JFLA 2010 last week and I've managed to grab him into the "RCBW tunnel". With a handful of well-targeted NMUs, he has fixed about 10 RC bugs in the few days of the conference. He is too shy to blog about that, but since I'm evil, I'm disclosing it here Welcome on board, Mehdi! (now you're doomed: you must continue doing that!)

Looking at using google apps for my home email, as I want to be able to have my home machines totally turned off from time to time. Found this interesting gem in the sign up agreement (which I have not yet agreed to ):

11. PR. Customer agrees not to issue any public announcement regarding the existence or content of this Agreement without Google s prior written approval. Google may (i) include Customer s Brand Features in presentations, marketing materials, and customer lists (which includes, without limitation, customer lists posted on Google s web sites and screen shots of Customer s implementation of the Service) and (ii) issue a public announcement regarding the existence or content of this Agreement. Upon Customer s request, Google will furnish Customer with a sample of such usage or announcement.

This is rather asymmetrical: If I agree to the sign up page, I cannot say I am using google apps , but google can say Robert is using google apps . While I can appreciate not wanting to be dissed on if something goes wrong, this is very much not open! A couple of implications: Everyone seeking support for google apps in the apps forums is probably in violation of the sign up agreement; we can assume that anyone having a terrible experience has been squelched under this agreement. Le sigh.

git archive provides an easy way of producing a tarball directly from a project's git branch.

For example, this is what we use to build the Mahara tarballs:

git archive --format=tar --prefix=mahara-$ VERSION / $ RELEASETAG bzip2 -9 > $ CURRENTDIR /mahara-$ RELEASE .tar.bz2

If you do this however, you end up with the entire contents of the git branch, including potentially undesirable files like .gitignore.

There is an easy, though not very well-documented, way of specifying files to exclude from such exports: gitattributes.

This is what the Mahara .gitattributes file looks like:

/test export-ignore
.gitattributes export-ignore
.gitignore export-ignore

With this file in the root directory of our repository, tarballs we generate using git archive no longer contain the selenium tests or the git config files.

If you start playing with this feature however, make sure you commit the .gitattributes file to your repository before running git archive. Otherwise the settings will not be picked up by git archive.

I do not like it when people tell Web 2.0 sites to send me invitation e-mail. I won t enumerate the reasons here. But there is one reason for why I don t like you passing on my address to those sites, which is subject of this article: Unlike popular belief, the Web 2.0 is not a money-printing machine. It s a long road until you can actually generate real money with user content. Therefore, some shadey sites are probably selling contact details to advertisers to make ends meet while hoping for the big cashflow. I don t have any data to back this up, and I want to change that:

Please tell all your Web 2.0 sites to send me an invitation! Please use an address in the signmeup.madduck.net domain for that, and make sure to include the domain name of the service to which you sign me up before the @ symbol. Also append a hyphen/dash and a random, short string. More on that in just a sec. For instance, if you are one of those people that believes that letting people know where you are (and have been) at any point in time, tell Foursquare to send an invitation to:

foursquare.com-ponies@signmeup.madduck.net

The reason for the random, short string ( ponies ) is simply so that I can later cross-check that a message receiving spam actually went through a social networking site I intend to catalog the invitation messages.

Thank you for your time. Keep in mind: the more, the merrier. I ll make sure to report back on the outcome of this little experiment right here, so watch this space. NP: Billy Joel: Cold Spring Harbor

... or why I mutilated your java package in Debian This post is especially addressed to what we Debian Developers refer to as upstream maintainers, that is the people who write/maintain the software that we package for Debian. It is meant to explain why, in some cases, Debian Developers prefer to mutilate your work rather than upload it to Debian Archives in a state that gives it proper credit. And to apologize. These opinions are my own, but I have a faint feeling that I'm not the only Debian Developer working like that, and that this few words could help soothe the relation betwenn Debian Developers and Upstream Maintainers, which can be quite tense some times... It happens unfortunately quite often (too often!) that I disable (or don't enable) features in programs I package. Exact reasons vary, but they essentially fall into two categories:

• A feature requires code that does not comply to Debian Free Software Guidelines, which Debian cannot distribute. This is a no-go.
• A relatively minor feature depends on other software that are not packaged yet, and in which I don't have specific interest, which means I would not be able to maintain them properly (or it would require too much packaging work and so on...).

When a program has features which falls in one of these categories, I have two choices: either I give up packaging the software or I give up some of the features... For packages for which I care, obviously the second option looks better from my point of view as a Debian Developer. Java packages are especially affected by this problem, for a very simple reason. Java is one of the few (I don't say only because I'll probably be flamed to death) programming languages which allows very easy distribution of binary platform-independent libraries, in the form of JAR files. Many projects simply reuse and embed JAR files published for other projects in their own JAR files, often without precise references to where the source code can be found. Packaging a moderately-sized Java application often rely on dozens of embedded JARs, which we need to remove from the packages we build (as Debian does not distribute binaries without sources for many reasons), and for which we need to hunt down the original source code and often packaging the original project, which might pull in yet other dependencies and so on... A true nightmare ! That's why it is so tempting some times to simply drop some of the code, possibly write patches to disable references to removed libraries, and be done with it. Therefore, I would wish to publicly apologize to any upstream developer I've offended by stripping down apparently carelessly their beautiful software before uploading to the Debian Archives; I hope they now understand why I've done that. Note to users: it is not because one of the features of your favorite software has been disabled by its (Debian) maintainer that you need to turn away from Debian ! Rather, file a bug report against the package. You'll get the reasons why the feature was disabled, and you have a chance to convince the maintainer to switch it back on.

Finally, I got my notebook working again. It seems a full Gnome installation isn t exactly what my old MacBook needed. So it lay around for weeks, or rather months now, not being used for anything remotely relevant to anything. After all I then decided to get rid of Gnome at least on the notebook and instead installed LXDE what can I say? It s amazing. Removing all the stuff I don t need anyways on this system (even the pbuilder/cowbuilder stuff is gone) made it really fast again. I m happy now and the vacation can come with my notebook at hand, since it s running again. Yet that s actually not what I wanted to write about. After a three week break due to illness (and, I admit, bad weather although it still is pretty snowy and icy outside) I m back on the track. And it wasn t even that bad. Of course I m not back on the level I had before but at least it s about 5.5 km in 35 minutes. For a beginner who just had a forced break from training, I m quite satisfied with myself. So, I m running again. Yay!

remember Mutt's mail in Org-mode and jump back to them As already anticipated, I've been implementing my own Getting Things Done work flow. This post documents one of its main bricks: the integration between Mutt and Org-mode. As a geek, my main incoming stream of TODO items and information in general is email. As emails hit my INBOX, I either deal with them immediately (reply, archive, delete) or I need to store them elsewhere, possibly adding extra information such as a deadline, a personal note, the associated next action, the context in which it is actionable, etc. This need of adding extra information is what defeats the usage of my mail client (Mutt) as a list manager (in the GTD sense), and that's where I plugged Org-mode in. My main goals are:

1. create Org-mode notes from Mutt, referencing the current email, and possibly inlining some of its metadata (e.g. subject, sender)
2. quickly retrieve referenced emails from Org-mode notes; ideally that should happen in my usual email environment (i.e. Mutt), so that I can process the retrieved mail as usual (e.g. to inform the sender that I did something about it)

In fact, both would be straightforward to achieve if I were using some Emacs-based mail client such as Gnus, but I resist the Emacs operating system syndrome, and therefore I insist in using my beloved Mutt. Let's see how the two parts of the interaction between Mutt and Org-mode work. (1) Mutt Org-mode (there ...) The interaction from Mutt to Org-mode happens via org-protocol. Using it external applications can feed content to Org-mode note templates, which are then interactively edited (via emacsclient), and finally filed away. The Mutt glue macro from my ~/.muttrc is as follow:

macro index \eR " ~/bin/remember-mail\n"

The remember-mail script is trivial: it parses the fed mail from STDIN (using a couple of legacy Perl modules) and then invokes org-protocol. The relevant configuration from my ~/.emacs is reported below; the comments explain the various parts:

;; standard org <-> remember stuff, RTFM
(org-remember-insinuate)
(setq org-default-notes-file "~/org/gtd.org")
(setq org-remember-templates  ;; mail-specific note template, identified by "m"
      '(("Mail" ?m "* %?\n\n  Source: %u, %c\n  %i" nil)))
;; ensure that emacsclient will show just the note to be edited when invoked
;; from Mutt, and that it will shut down emacsclient once finished;
;; fallback to legacy behavior when not invoked via org-protocol.
(add-hook 'org-remember-mode-hook 'delete-other-windows)
(setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)
(defadvice org-remember-finalize (after delete-frame-at-end activate)
  "Delete frame at remember finalization"
  (progn (if my-org-protocol-flag (delete-frame))
     (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)))
(defadvice org-remember-kill (after delete-frame-at-end activate)
  "Delete frame at remember abort"
  (progn (if my-org-protocol-flag (delete-frame))
     (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)))
(defadvice org-protocol-remember (before set-org-protocol-flag activate)
  (setq my-org-protocol-flag t))

The result is that when you hit ESC-R in Mutt, emacsclient will be fired up in place presenting a note template that already contains relevant mail information (date, subject, from) and lets you add extra information before going away. Additionally, the email message-id will be hidden in the note as a mutt: hyperlink with anchor text "mail". (2) Org-mode Mutt (... and back again) Going back means that clicking on a "mail" hyperlink within an Org-mode note should bring up a Mutt instance showing the original message, in its context (e.g. its own mailbox). Achieving that consists of 2 separate steps:

1. looking up a specific message by Message-ID
2. firing up Mutt on the looked up message

For the first part I use maildir-utils (AKA mu): a Xapian-based mail indexing tool, which nicely integrates with Mutt; check out my previous blog post on the subject for a sample setup. Using mu, Message-ID lookups are as simple as:

zack@usha:~$ mu find -f p m:E1NbJad-0007x9-B7@ries.debian.org
/home/zack/Maildir/Debian.project/cur/1264883664_0.9472.usha,U=6320,FMD5=2284e927bb93d8a2ec434f5614dc04ba:2,S

Note: I'm relying upon maildir-utils version 0.6 or greater, for all presented scripts. For the second part I use the mutt-open script which fires upon a Mutt instance on the maildir containing a specific message, and then "hits" the appropriate keys to open the message and shutdown the sidebar (if desired). It is a nicely reusable script, which I've being using elsewhere too. The needed glue on the emacs side is just a function to invoke mutt-open in a brand new terminal, and its declaration as the handler for mutt: URLs.

(defun open-mail-in-mutt (message)
  "Open a mail message in Mutt, using an external terminal.
Message can be specified either by a path pointing inside a
Maildir, or by Message-ID."
  (interactive "MPath or Message-ID: ")
  (shell-command
   (format "gnome-terminal -e \"%s %s\""
       (substitute-in-file-name "$HOME/bin/mutt-open") message)))
;; add support for "mutt:ID" links
(org-add-link-type "mutt" 'open-mail-in-mutt)

Voil ! Download Summary of scripts and configuration snippets discussed above:

• remember-mail - store in Org-mode a note back-referencing an email
• mutt-open - open Mutt on an email having a specific Message-ID
• Emacs configuration
• Mutt configuration