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?
