Nilesh Patra <nilesh@nileshpatra.info> wrote on 28/08/2022 at 07:37:07+0200:
> Hi,
>
> I have used my primary email address with folder hooks to sort out mails
> according to mailing lists/subjects, using folder hooks and read those folders
> every once in a while (depending on how involved I am with each ML/team)
> However, despite that I am seeing quite a bit of debian stuff in
> my inbox (sometimes there is an insane amount of noise there)
> and it distracts me when I want to be doing something else, and end up reading
> thread after thread which I _should_ save for later.
> (Yeah, maybe you can blame me for it :))
>
> So, two questions:-
> - - Do you use your primary email address for debian stuff as well,
> or is it a different one?
Yes, I use peb@pimeys.fr which is my main public mail since 2014.
> - - Do you have any sensible way to cope up with so many mails from
> different mailing lists and not potentially miss out on something important?
My previous setup, relying on mutt, and aggressive procmail filtering,
was working nice, my inbox only had mails for my Debian address that
really needed to land there. The issue I had was that relevant mail also
went into some directories I regularly forgot to read and sometimes I
found myself lagging because of that rather than because I'm lazy.
I wanted to move to mutt + notmuch, but I did not really like it. So I
tried emacs + notmuch but I was also unhappy.
Then I remembered my PhD Director was using emacs + mu + mu4e. mu and
notmuch are quite comparable (they're very efficient very fast mail
indexers/searching tools), and mu4e was more of what I expected for a
frontend in emacs.
So, this is my setup, now, and it takes no time for mu to lookup in its
index of my 316k mails and to grab me the ones that match best my query,
and then it takes little time to mu4e to grab the threads around these
mails and give them to me.
The setup is a bit tedious the first time, though : you need to do
either offlineimap or mbsync/isync to grab all mails locally, then you
need to configure mu/notmuch to index those mails (indexing several
thousands mails takes a bit of time), and then you can start to
browse. (and you need to learn how to use these softs, too)
Some pros:
1. You have a full copy of your mails locally.
2. It's still IMAP so there's synchronization of states.
3. It's *really* fast to search and retrieve
4. It can cope with truckloads of mails
Some cons:
1. The MUA is constrained (notmuch is working with few MUAs, mu, I
aready know of mu4e for emacs)
2. New softs to learn to use, a toolchain a bit more complex
3. Local storage is impacted (twice, for the raw mails, and for the
index database)
4. With mu (IDK for notmuch), updates come sometimes with non-backward
compatible xapian DB update, and one needs to reindex (I had to do
it twice in a year or so).
Cheers,
--
PEB
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