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I'll never forget, for the rest of my life, a devastating email scenario that I was one keypress away from executing that would have had serious dire consequenc
by hellofunk 11y ago
I'll never forget, for the rest of my life, a devastating email scenario that I was one keypress away from executing that would have had serious dire consequences.
It was 2003 and I was a dedicated and exclusive Mutt user (this, before Gmail came along).
Due to some accidental press of the wrong key combination, somehow Mutt managed to take every single email in my Sent folder and combine it into one gigantic aggregate text document -- a record of all emails I'd ever sent from that account -- and turn this aggregate itself into an outgoing email, ready for sending.
What's worse, it took every address that had ever been in a To: field in any Sent mail and put them all as one big list in this aggregate email's To field!
With just one more keypress, had I accidentally then sent this, every person I'd ever emailed would have received a copy of every email to any person I'd ever sent.
Can you imagine the disaster? That I could concoct such an email accidentally was terribly frightening and that was the last year I ever used Mutt.
- mineo 11y agoThis is why you don't let cats anywhere near your keyboard ;-)
- 2bluesc 11y agoI'd love to know this key sequence. Did it involve a cat?
- freshprince 11y agoI guess it would be something like this: T.<cr>;g 'T' means tag messages matching a given pattern. '.' would be the pattern that matches all messages in the current mailbox. So now all messages are tagged. ';' is the prefix for 'do the next command for every message that is tagged' and 'g' is reply to all.
- dsr_ 11y agoMutt will then assemble everything into a single massively multipart mail message and bring it up in your editor so that you can write an additional message of your own. Then you have to save the edited file and OK mutt to send it. I would not characterize this as a single command...
- yoavm 11y agoWell, if you do want to send all-your-emails-since-ever to all-your-contacts, I bet it's a lot harder to do in Gmail. Perhaps that's where Mutt shines!
- kqr 11y agoYou're joking, but it's true. It's the same thing with any poweruser tool, like Vim and tiling window managers. You can accomplish surprisingly difficult tasks in just a few keystrokes, but you can also destroy everything just as easily.
- SZJX 11y agoTBH I don't think you can easily destroy things in Vim/Emacs though. As long as you don't for some reason run it as sudo the security mechanism is quite robust.
- pttrsmrt 11y agoDo you smell that smell?