Can msed write labels or label edits to the original mail file?

[John Flood]

One of the reasons I became interested in mblaze was failure to get the editlabel script to work with mutt.  When, e.g., cleaning up my INBOX it was easy with mutt to tag and move emails from the same address to a folder, but I also had emails, say, from various students that I would wish to move to a common "student" folder by first labeling them and then filtering for the label and moving them at once.

My question here is about msed which I was able to use to add a label (but not edit and existing one used by Gmail like one with "\Important").  However, even though I could add a new label which would appear in the output of msed, the change did not seem to affect the actual email itself.  If I used mhdr, the change would not appear.

So, am I expecting something that msed was not designed to do or is there a way to write the output of msed to the email itself.

[Leah Neukirchen]

John Flood <jflo...@gmail.com> writes:

> One of the reasons I became interested in mblaze was failure to get the

> editlabel <https://blitiri.com.ar/p/other/mutt-labels/> script to work with

Yes, indeed msed only prints the message to standard output.

I would not recommend using it to manipulate persisted messages as it
also unfolds the headers.

You can use formail(1) like the editlabel script for that, it should
only touch affected lines.

--
Leah Neukirchen <le...@vuxu.org> https://leahneukirchen.org/

[John Flood]

Dear Leah,

Thanks very much for your response.  It answered my question and gives me a way forward.

This response is much delayed due to "circumstances beyond my control" (narrowly escaping from my country of residence to my home country for leave in the midst of spiking Covid, vaccine shortages, etc.)  I am just starting to go through the formail man page and seeing how I can figure out what might be blocking the effectiveness of the editlabel script. I will post again later. 

Thanks again,

John Flood