Question

I’m trying to use nmh’s “draftfolder” feature to queue outgoing mail for later delivery.
The key step I don’t know how to implement is how to write a program that will send a message from a draft folder.

Here’s the workflow I’m trying to achieve:

1. I compose a message using the comp or repl programs, and I quit with the message unsent, leaving it in the “draft folder” +delay4.

2. Sometime after four hours have elapsed, a cron job comes along and sends the message, removing it from the draft folder.

Here are the difficulties I’m having with existing MH commands

• The comp -use command can send an existing message from a draft folder, but it requires interaction. I want to do this noninteractively from a cron job, and I’d prefer not to try to write an expect script. I tried

  comp -use -noedit -nowhatnowproc
  

  but that did not send the message. I don’t know if some kind of alternate whatnow program would do the trick.

• The send and post commands look promising, but both expect to operate on files, not messages in folders. Maybe send followed by rmm works, maybe it doesn’t.

• I could go direct to sendmail, but then I would have to figure out whether to run mhbuild or not. And I would seem to have the same issue of needing to remove the message from the folder.

My question is how can I use the MH API in a script to send a message that is sitting in a draft folder?

Answer 1

RTFM.

The send command’s -draftfolder option makes it work on messages, not files.
Perfect for what I want. If you want to be extra explicit, use the -draftmessage option as well.