IMAP partial fetch in mutt

Question

The IMAP protocol supports a feature called 'partial fetch', which allows a client to download only a part of a MIME message. This is very useful on slow connections

I am using the mutt MUA. I would like to tell mutt to only download the first part, or only download the text/plain parts, or some other similar rule

• Does mutt support IMAP partial fetch?
• If it doesn't, is there any other way to download only a small part of a big message using mutt [ and maybe other programs ]

Answer 1

According to http://dev.mutt.org/trac/ticket/3465 mutt does not yet support partial fetch. I'm not aware of a workaround in this case, and any possible workaround would likely be problematic (attachments would be difficult to download, etc) to implement such a solution.

Answer 2

I just came across this question while looking for the same facility in Mutt. I have found that on my slow connection I often end up killing mutt to stop it from re-downloading big messages that I accidentally navigate into. However I just found that there is an option to cache messages as well as headers

set message_cachedir="~/.mutt_msgcache"

In this way I only have to wait for the message to download once. This makes it much more usable. I guess if I had read the help I would have been aware of it sooner...