Re: How to organize mail in folders?
On Fri, Jul 20, 2007 at 05:05:23PM +0200, Kai Grossjohann wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 20, 2007 at 03:19:42PM +0100, Chris G wrote:
>
> > The above strategy is a pretty good description of what I actually do.
>
> I wish I was that organized. It's difficult for me to muster the
> self-discipline to actually do this.
>
The major discipline in my experience is just that of creating a
usable and easy to navigate hierarchy for the saved messages. It's
taken me a few years to tune this to my satisfaction. Once created it
makes saving messages relatively easy.
> > The only difference in my case is that I use a procmail lookalike
> > (it's a perl sript) to sort incoming mail, basically into a mailbox
> > per mailing list and my main inbox.
>
> Yes, that seems like a good extension. And easy enough to do.
>
> > Which parts of the above would you automate?
>
> Michelle pointed out archivemail. This way, I could have an "active"
> folder per project, then automatically move messages to a corresponding
> "archive" folder.
>
I do something akin to this I suppose. My mail lives on a remote
system (at Gradwell.Net) where there is limited disk space, though
much less limited now in fact. I do a daily backup from there to my
home system using rsync. I use maildir so each message is a separate
file and thus old mail messages on my home system will never get
deleted when doing the rsync copy, this means that I can 'thin out'
the stored mail on the remote system at Gradwell and still have the
old messages on my home system.
> > I can't really see what can be automated except, possibly, the
> > "archive by project". My archive folders don't really correspond to
> > anything that could be gleaned from the E-Mails (except, in some
> > cases, the sender) so the ones I save I just save manually.
>
> Suppose that I only have a global inbox and a global todo folder (aside
> from the mailing lists). Then I could tell Mutt to always remember
> message ids of refoldered messages together with their target folder.
>
> Then "archive by project" could look in the References header whether
> one of the message ids there is known, then automatically file to the
> correct folder.
>
Yes, I suppose so, however my todo/pending messages rarely get moved
to storage/archive.
--
Chris Green