<<< Date Index >>>     <<< Thread Index >>>

Re: How to organize mail in folders?



On Sat, Jul 21, 2007 at 01:15:28PM +0200, Stefano Sabatini wrote:
> On date Friday 2007-07-20 15:33:37 +0200, Kai Grossjohann muttered:
> > Michelle,
> > 
> > I think there is a misunderstanding.  I wanted to understand how other
> > people process their email.  You are giving me pointers to programs but
> > don't describe how you use them.
> > 
> > Here is a potential strategy for handling mail:
> > 
> >   - All incoming mail goes to inbox.
> >   - I process all mails from inbox.
> >   - Some messages I read, then delete right away.
> >   - Other messages I read, then archive by project.
> >     By project means that there is a folder for each project.
> >   - Some messages I read, then respond to and archive (by project).
> >   - Some messages I read, decide that I can't handle them right
> >     away, so I put them in the todo folder.  Every morning I go
> >     through my todo folder.
> >   - Some messages (often those sent by me) are waiting for responses
> >     from others.  I file those in the "pending" folder.  Every
> >     morning I go through my "pending" folder to see whether a response
> >     has arrived.
> > 
> > Some of the above steps could be automated.  The strategy does not
> > handle mailing lists well.  But I hope it shows one possible response
> > and makes it clear in what way your response differs from what I was
> > expecting.
> 
> My strategy:
> 
> * all mailboxes, both archives and inboxes ones are in maildir format.
> 
> * messages are fetched by fetchmail then processed by procmail. Every
>   mailing list has a corresponding maildir in inbox/, for example I
>   have inbox/mutt-users, inbox/gnome-list etc, and there is a generic
>   mailbox (inbox/generic) for all the other mails. I could easily
>   modify this to have different inboxes where to manage mails incoming
>   not from ML (e.g. inbox/generic, inbox/work, etc.).  I also have an
>   inbox/almost-certainly-spam and inbox/maybe-spam, where all the
>   mails marked as spam by spamassassin go.
> 
Apart from the names this is almost exactly what I do (using a perl
script rather than procmail, but that's a detail).


However the subsequent (seems very complex) stuff is far more than I
want to have to maintain!  :-)

[big snip]

What I do to manage mailing list subscriptions and the corresponding
'subscribe' and 'lists' and 'mailboxes' commands is to have a file
called 'lists' which is used by both my muttrc file and the perl
script that does procmail's job.

My muttrc file just has the following:-

    lists `awk '!/^#/ {printf("%s ", $2)}' <~/.mutt/lists`
    subscribe `awk '!/^#/ {printf("%s ", $2)}' <~/.mutt/lists`

and the perl script uses the same entries to direct mailing list mail
to the appropriate mailbox.

When I subscribe to a new list I just add a line the the 'lists' file,
for example the mutt line is:-

    mutt        mutt-users@xxxxxxxx

I also have a line in my muttrc:-

    source ~/bin/getAliases.awk|

Which generates mutt aliases from the 'lists' file.  Some entries in
the 'lists' file have a third field which is text to be *removed* from
the Subject: (many mailing lists insist on putting the mailing list
name in the Subject:).

-- 
Chris Green