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Re: Rolling in sidebar, other mutt-ng type bits?



On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 10:19:38PM +0100, Anders Karlsson wrote:
> * Derek Martin <invalid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [20081028 21:07]:
> > On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 11:46:38AM +0100, Anders Karlsson wrote:
> > > As long as you specify your mailfolders with "mailboxes", you can use
> > > "c" or "y" to change to a folder with new mail or get quick overview
> > > of the folders with new mail. You just won't see how many unread there
> > > are - but do you really care about that?
> > 
> > Yes?  Sometimes? :)
> 
> I used to think I did. 

Perhaps I should have said, "yes, I absolutely do.  Just not all the
time."

My previous professional role was a support role, and the group I
worked for managed workflow (requests from users) in part via mailing
lists dedicated to the specific type of request.  There were about 10
such lists.  Filtering them each into their own folders was essential,
because different engineers would be assigned to watch different
lists, and most of the lists were very high volume (in total between
them I typically received 800 - 1200 messages per day).  I did not use
the side bar patch for various reasons, and I found it rather
difficult to avoid falling behind in lists mentioned later in my
muttrc...  This would have been avoided completely if I had the
ability to see which folders had how many new messages at a glance...  

[It would have also been completely avoided if the group used more
sane workflow management methodologies, but that's a side issue.]

> procmail or Sieve to slice and dice your mail into folders, and then
> you can check with 'y' which ones (and you then know what's important
> and what's not) has new mail.

As I said, this doesn't work reliably if you have mbox folders, and
doesn't work terribly well if you have *a lot* of folders.  The first
you can fix by using maildir exclusively (which I did/do, specifically
to fix this problem), but the second can't be fixed by anything other
than something like the sidebar patch.

> I'm one of those dino's that like mutt, screen, irssi, emacs and
> elinks. 

I do too; I would just like mutt that much more if I could have 3
panes.  I've been using Mutt since the 1.2 days, and one would be
hard-pressed to convince me to switch to something else.  If someone
wrote a curses-based MUA that had most of the power of mutt, but had a
3-paned design and real pop-up menus and dialogs (the status bar
should be for status, not selecting options or displaying errors),
that would win me...

I have to admit that I basically like the GUI mailers, except that I
can't use them (reasonably) over an ssh session (which is a
requirement for me), and Mutt is still more powerful than any that
I've used to date.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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