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@mutt.org
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
