== Interfacing Recoll and Mutt

It is possible to either use Mutt as a Recoll search result viewer, or
start Recoll from the Mutt search.

=== Starting Mutt to view Recoll search results

This method and the associated 
link:http://www.recoll.org/files/recoll2mutt[recoll2mutt script] were kindly
contributed by Morten Langlo.

This allows finding mail messages in recoll and then calling *mutt*
or *mutt-kz* to read or process the mail. 

Installation:

- Copy the [[http://www.recoll.org/files/recoll2mutt|recoll2mutt script]]
  somewhere in your PATH, and make it executable.
- In the **recoll** GUI menus: 
_Preferences->GUI configuration->User interface->Choose editor applications_
change the entry for "message/rfc822" to: +recoll2mutt %f+

The script has options for setting a number of parameters, you may not need
to set any of them, the defaults are:

- -c mutt
- -F .muttrc
- -m Mail
- -x "-fn 10*20 -geometry 115x40"

Example:

----
recoll2mutt -c mutt-kz -F .mutt_kzrc -m Mail -x "-fn 10*20 -geometry 115x40"  %f
----

The option +-x+ is passed to *xterm*, which is used to call *mutt* or
*mutt-kz*.

The script works for both _mbox_ and _maildir_ mail boxes, and it
expects the configuration file for mutt and the mail directory to reside in
your $HOME and the spool file to be '/var/spool/mail/$USER' if it is
not in your mail directory. But it is easy to change the values in the
script if you need to.

*mutt* is opened with the right mailbox and limit set to _Date_ and
_Sender_.  In theory you could set limit to _Message-Id_, but very often
*mutt* reports, that there are invalid patterns in _Message-Id_, so do it
safe, even though all emails in the opened mail box with the same date from
the sender are shown.


=== Starting Recoll from the Mutt search

This will work only when using maildir storage (messages in individual
files). It will not work with mailbox files. The latter would probably be
possible by extracting the individual result messages using the Python
interface, but I did not try.

The classic way to interface Mutt and a search application is to create a
shortcut to an external command which creates a temporary Maildir
containing the search results.

There is such a script for Recoll, you will find it link:https://bitbucket.org/medoc/recoll/raw/41d41799dbac4c69a34db985b3ab9f1597c9c742/src/python/samples/mutt-recoll.py[here].

Copy the script somewhere in your PATH, and make it executable, then add
the following line to your '.muttrc':


----

macro index S "<enter-command>unset wait_key<enter><shell-escape>mutt-recoll.py -G<enter><change-folder-readonly>~/.cache/mutt_results<enter>" \
          "search mail (using recoll)"

----

Obviously, you can replace the 'S' letter with whatever will suit you (e.g:/)