Like many people's, my incoming mail is routed off into various folders by the MTA which I then read with mutt. The problem is that while mutt's mail folder handling is pretty darn good it's still a pain for it to scan the folders[1]. There are about a dozen I like to read throughout the day. The alternative I've tried is running lots of mutt jobs, sometimes in handily clickable virtual Konsoles. But it's still a drag (I'm *that* lazy).
How do people deal with this appalling modern dilemma? One hack I've considered is saving duplicates of my interesting folders into one folder which I set to threaded display & read as a stream as it comes in. This leaves the hassle of having lots of other folders with unread messages (so perhaps a script that marks those as read based on message-id's -- anyone seen/done this?). Anyone played with/heard about putting mail itself in RDBMS? That way you could create virtual folders etc. While I'm on this subject, how do people deal with searching email? Archival management? (And how that impacts searching?) I will write up a Web page on all this seeded on whatever comes out of this, if there isn't one already. Mutt infovert: For those new to mutt, you have a powerful message searching & display capability with the 'l' for 'limit' key. l london.pm.org displays only messages with to/from/subject containing that string, l ~f paul.makepeace ~b exim limits from paul.makepeace and body contains exim. l . turns off the limit (yup, they're all regexes). (HTH!) Paul [1] yeah, yeah I'm still using BSD spools. Despite having even added maildir to one popd I still fear migrating hundreds of megs of email to maildir. Is anyone using maildir with mutt? How quick is it scanning a dir with 30k files?