Re: How to organize mail in folders?
On Fri, Jul 20, 2007 at 03:33:37PM +0200, Kai Grossjohann wrote:
> 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's how I do it - probably a long way from what you want, but it
works well enough for me.
Basic features/requirements:
1. All my mail is on my local server. I have accessed it remotely
by ssh and ip address in the past, but mostly I'm at home and I use
mutt either in the console, or more usually in an xterm with ssh.
2. I'm on enough lists that I can't keep up at certain times, like
now (I read lkml, and traffic during the merge window is very
heavy).
3. This isn't for business, I don't have to respond and I don't
have to keep copies of everything (although I do keep most things
for some time).
4. I like to be able to search back through mail I've seen.
Usually, what happened more than a month or so ago is out of sight
and out of mind, but sometimes I want to refer back.
5. I don't send many mails each month, so it is convenient for me
to just have a single mailbox or directory for them. And in this
case, I very rarely want to search back through past months to see
what I said. If I do, grep and view are my friends.
6. Knowing what needs a response is a separate issue. I like
paper, but then most of my important correspondence doesn't use
email.
My disks all run ext3 filesystems - historically, ext2/3 were not
good with large directories. I haven't tested them with my current
volume of data, so I just stick to mbox format (which probably also
saves disk space for me).
The first part of my setup uses .procmailrc to put mail into
a reasonable number of different mboxes. Preceded by SpamAssassin
(and yes, everything it catches is kept for occasional review -
don't want to lose messages just because they were miscategorised).
If the mail doesn't trigger any rules, it falls through to my main
mailbox.
The second part of the setup uses a series of month directories
under ~/mailboxes, with a cron job to run at the start of each month
(my server is up 247) to stop fetchmail, backup the mailboxes from
the new month and then delete them, change the symlink from ~/mail,
and restart fetchmail. I wrote my own series of scripts (one for
root, which then calls the user script(s)). Not easily maintainable
for new users, but works for me. I've seen a reference to at least
one package for 'rotating' mailboxes in this sort of fashion on this
list, but I can't find a suitable keyword to grep through the past
mail - so in this instance, my method didn't help.
In practice, my main mailbox is a symlink to ~/mailboxes/mymail -
from time to time I will prune 'mymail', but I've got more than 2
years of my non-list correspondence. At the start of each month, I
go through and create symlinks to mailboxes from the previous month
that I want to catch up with or want to refer back to - I name these
starting with a z so that they drop off the bottom of the screen when
the number of mailboxes grows. The script also creates empty
mailboxes for spam that got through (I run sa-learn twice a day), and
for the occasional non-spam that was misidentified.
Sometimes, I create additional symlinks (y... then x...) to
specific mailboxes from earlier months that where I need to
follow-up.
Also, my lkml mailbox overflows somewhere around the 48MB mark - not
sure why, but procmail stops writing to it - so I repeat the rule to
write to 'lkml2' and potentially 'lkml3'.
This is somewhat messy, but it works well enough except when I
accidentally fill up ~/home.
Summary - main mailbox is for things I'm keeping long-term, a few
mailboxes for different things (less than 20 each month - my screen
is 40 rows in an xterm), enough space to never have to delete things
by hand, and some simple scripts to manage it. When I started using
email, I used to mostly delete after reading, or after responding.
In those days, I used netscape, and then pine, and it was all on one
box but even then it was a pain to go through deleting mail on a
high-volume list, and I often deleted things I didn't intend to, or
later wished I hadn't.
Probably, very different from what you were thinking of doing. If
you want to say 'too complex' or 'too byzantine' or 'too much space'
that's fine by me.
Ken
--
das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce