On 28Oct2009 22:08, Charles Howard <incuba...@hotmail.co.uk> wrote: | Every so often someone asks about nested subfolders with mutt. I've read most of | those back to about start of 2007. | | I'd like such a system but I haven't got it to work. My question is: | | Do you, a mutt user, who is reading this, delete most of your email within a short | period (say a week) ?
Not really. I do move my old email off yearly (eg all of 2008 gets moved sideways sometime in Feb 2009 - Jan is too early). That's for mailing lists. So for each main folder "foo" I make an "OLD/foo/2008" and move the mail into there. I maintain a symlink called "O" that points at "OLD/2008" where "2008" is the most recent year. Why? Because I've mapped (d)elete to "save to O/foldername". My main inbox, where supposedly important stuff tries to go, I do not treat that way. I keep a lot of stuff there. My index view is sorted on reverse thread date; the most recent email is at the top and you know how deep/recent the thread is; it helps avoid premature response to a message early in a thread then there's another reply later in the thread covering it. I do (F)lag messages I really must reply to or reread so I can find them with a (l)imit: ~F later. I _strongly_ recommend the header-cache facility; it makes opening folders with 10s of thousands of messages very quick. | Here's my background. I am an academic and I get about 1000 emails a month. This doesn't | include solid-crap spam (nor mailing lists) and I need to keep most of the 1000. I used pine | (pre alpine) for many years and had a coarse-sort system of nested folders that worked quite | well. I was attracted to mutt by being able to write config files in emacs, by the prospect of | using procmail to do presorting, and by the prospect of using mairix to search across the folder | system. And the colours are nice too. (I have Mutt 1.5.18 under Ubuntu 9.04, using Maildir, | downloading to hard disc by running fetchmail on commandline (so I don't get distracted | by new mail while dealing with existing).) | | Maybe mutt just isn't for keepers of emails? Or am I missing something? No, it's actually really good for keepers of email. Can you detail your nested system? I'm sure I and others will have suggestions for re-implementing it or for a scheme of similar usefulness to you. I see you already use mairix. I keep a mairix index for the top folders and one for each yearly archive (essentially to keep the memory and runtime footprints down - mairix loads the whole index when it does updates). Default search uses the top index, but I have another small shell script to search everything. In short, my nest looks like this (more folders than shown): me # important mail goes here mutt # the mutt lists go here mac # mac lists go here python # python lists go here O -> OLD/2008 OLD/2008/me # (d)eleted mail from folder "me" OLD/2008/mutt, ... # likewise And then there's the spam filtering and mail filing rules... Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson <c...@zip.com.au> DoD#743 http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/ It is disconcerting to reflect on the number of students we have flunked in chemistry for not knowing what we later found to be untrue. - quoted by Robert L. Weber's, _Science With a Smile_, 1992
