Hm, I need to split this mail because I got it back with a message telling me that only 20k characters are allowed.
This is part one. On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 09:34:49AM -0500, Derek Martin wrote: > On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 09:54:16PM -0600, lee wrote: > > > So, in other words, you would need to manually mark the message as > > > belonging to a category. You would need to take action to associate > > > the message with a category. So, what's the problem with just moving > > > the mail to a category-specific mail folder, exactly? > > > > 1.) It is awkward. > > My point above was that it's going to be awkward regardless; you're > going to have to take some action to manually mark your messages with > your category. Yes, but that doesn't mean that there couldn't be an easier way to do that than there is now. > > 2.) It would mess up the folder hierarchy I already have by greatly > > increasing the number of folders. It's too complicated. > > You can adress this with the macros I suggested to put you in > "category" mode vs. "normal" mode. It has the effect of distinguising > the folders for categories from your regular mail folders. Maybe, but to do that, I would have to spend a lot of time to learn how to create macros and to program some that would do what I want. And I don't want to use two different modes. > > 3.) It's incompatible with the folder hierarchy I have. > > Given the above, I don't see how... It would create another folder hierarchy within the one I already have --- or, even more complicated, somewhere else. > > 4.) The messages would be out of sight and not easy to access and > > would be forgotten. > > I already covered this; you leave them marked new, and Mutt will > remind you that they are there. This is not any different from the > way you are currently managing new mail in different folders... I would have to keep marking them as new after I read them, then move them into other folders. Then mutt would keep nagging me about them. > > If there's another new message that would belong to a category I > > have, I would have to browse through the folder hierarchy, and I > > would have to remember for each directory I see in the list if it's > > a maildir or a directory that contains maildirs. Changing folders in > > mutt is fumbly (c TAB TAB enter CTRL-g CTRL-g c TAB TAB down down > > ... enter ?? q ??? CTRL-g ... Hmm.? c ...). > > This is simply false. Press 'c' to change folders. Now press '?' to > bring up the list of mailboxes you've told Mutt to watch with the > mailboxes configuration keyword. They're all there. Now type the > number of the folder you want to enter, or use your keyboard's > directional keys to select it if you prefer. It's that easy. It shows all the folders --- pressing y shows only the ones in the config. Some of the folders shown with c are just directories that have maildirs in them, some of them are maildirs, some of the folders I have are maildirs with submaildirs. Mutt shows them without distinction and eventually gets confused when dealing with a directory that is not a maildir, or it treats a maildir that has a submaildir as a directory. Why doesn't mutt show directories as directories, maildirs as maildirs and maildirs with submaildirs as such in the list so that you can tell from the list which is which, without having to switch into a directory first? And is it possible to get a recursive list so that I could switch to a subdirectory directly instead of having to go from one directory to another? > > 5.) There's no way to delete maildirs from within mutt. Mutt is not a > > file manager and shouldn't have to be one. > > This seems not relevant; there's no need for Mutt to delete the > maildir. It is relevant to me because I don't want to pile up empty maildirs throughout my mail storage. Mutt doesn't even show you in the list of directories how many mails there are in a directory, so empty ones remain unnoticed. To prevent piling up empty maildirs, I think three times before creating a new one and preferably don't, and when one is empty, I'm forced to open a shell and to delete it right away because if I don't, I either forget which one to delete or would have to write it down. I only did that when I was cleaning up my mails, and that means that when I need to delete an empty maildir, I'm forced to interrupt what I'm doing and to change to another program to find and delete the maildir. On top of that, since maildirs have subdirectories, you either delete four directories or use rm -rf. Of course, rm -rf is something you have to be really careful with ... It's awkward. Just keep the number of maildirs as low as possible. > Just ignore it if there's no mail in it. Remove it by hand > if you feel you really need to (but you don't). What's the point of having hundreds of maildirs in the list of which many are empty? That makes things just more difficult. > But as we've > discussed in a different thread, it's not safe for Mutt to remove > maildirs -- the implementation is a bit difficult and can't be made > safe in all cases. Yeah, I know --- but what's the difference between me deleting a maildir using a shell and me deleting a maildir using mutt in regard to safety? The difference is that I use rm -rf, which isn't save at all, while mutt could do it safely and even warn me if there are still mails in the maildir. There's nothing against mutt giving you a warning "hey, if you delete a maildir, that could be unsafe ... Show this warning again or not? ..." Or make it an option that can be enabled in the configuration and explain the problem in the documentation. I guess like 99% of the users who find out about it would turn it on. > Sure, but aside from being accustomed to the way you're doing it now, > there's no good reason for you not to change the way you're handling > your mail. This method works, and works very well. And best of all, > it's not *that* different from what you're doing now, so you don't > need to change very much. If it's such a great way, why is the support for it so poor? The reason I didn't do it in another way is because it's so awkward to deal with many folders. > > What I'm not done with has to stay in the inbox so that I keep being > > remembered of it and don't have to remember that I should search for > > something and do something with/about it. > > This is also simply false. No, it is true. > If you have new mail in other folders, Mutt will remind you that > it's there, so you can't possibly forget about it unless you choose > to stubbornly ignore Mutt telling you about new mail in other > folders. This requirement is arbitrary and self-imposed, and it is > not a real requirement at all. Well, I guess you prefer to split things up while I prefer to have an organized overview (without being nagged and without having to go to lengths to keep things organized). > > > Better yet, let a filtering program like procmail do it for you. > > > Before the computer is able to understand what mails are about, such > > programs remain unable to decide into what category I might want to > > put a particular mail. To edit my .forward file so that a mail is > > delivered into the appropriate maildir (category), I would have to > > predict that I'm going to get this mail and to predict the contents of > > it. > > This may or may not be difficult, depending on your particular > needs. I can't predict the future. > But I am strongly inclined to think that you're making this a lot more > difficult than it needs to be. You can solve your problem TODAY, > simply by changing the way you think about how you handle your mail. > The tools to do what you want already exist in Mutt (and many other > mail clients); you simply need to choose to use them the way they were > intended to be used. I don't see where these tools are. They might be there without me seeing them, but what I am seeing is insufficient, see above. Or can you get mutt to display a distinctive folder list, if you want recursive, TODAY? Can mutt delete maildirs TODAY? Can mutt assign mail to categories and display categories --- or at least folders --- in the message list TODAY? Can you have an entry on top of the message list you press enter on and it takes you to the folder list TODAY? Why am I supposed to work the way software allows me to, rather than that the software helps me working the way I want to? It's like you're driving a car, but the car only allows you to make right turns. It makes getting somewhere awkward because you constantly have to figure out how to get to your destination making right turns only, and you eventually have to take long detours. What will happen is that there are a lot of destinations you avoid going to because it's so difficult to get to them having to make right turns only. Wouldn't you eventually start thinking that the car should be modified to allow making left turns, or start looking for another car? > > It works fine for mailing lists because it is predictable > > You simply filter on the list address. I'm filtering on the labels they put into header lines. The sender address varies, the recipient address varies when they cc to the mailing list instead of cc-ing to whom they answer. The labels stay the same most of the time, but they can change without notice. > > And I'm hoping that computers never get intelligent enough to read my > > mail. > > They already are; this is essentially no different from how > spamassassin filters spam. You just have to teach it what you want. It's not reading the mail, no more than sed, your favorite text editor, mutt, exim ... It does pattern matching, but it doesn't have any understanding at all what a mail is about. Or do you have spamassassin or another software make up summaries of the mail you're receiving? If the computer would do that, I won't read or write mail or think about how to deal with it. It would write appropriate answers and only inform me about the outcome, if there is any. *** see part 1-1/2 ***
