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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