Re: [VM] Mainly: How do you use virtual folders every day? and other questions

[Uday Reddy]

address@hidden writes:

> Uday Reddy wrote some time ago
> (http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/viewmail-info/2012-10/msg00025.html) :
> > But I still wanted the subject tags retained in the INBOX
> > folders, because the mail comes from a variety of sources and I want to be
> > able to quickly eyeball it for important stuff.  However, once I have filed
> > away the mail in archival folders, I wanted the subject tags to disappear.
> 
> My question is: How, in more detail, do you use vm, dealing with lots of
> email traffic, lists, newsletters and private mails?  

I discovered through experience that I am the kind of guy that only looks at
one INBOX regularly.  So, sorting incoming mail into separate folders
doesn't help me.  I never look at the stuff that has been sorted away.  So,
I stick to a single INBOX.

(That is not entirely true.  I have a separate INBOX on my home account, one
on gmail, and one for my vmrocks account etc.  But I look at those less
frequently, and things that go there are rarely time-critical.  This mailing
list, for instance, goes into my "standard" INBOX.)

My normal mode of reading email is:

- if something can be taken care of immediately, do it, and archive it.
(What I mean by "archive" is saving it in a purpose-built folder, perhaps
the folder for a course I am teaching, a research project I am working on,
discussions with a particular colleague etc.)

- if it cannot be taken care of immediately and needs to stay around in the
INBOX, leave it there.  Typically, there will be some toing-and-froing and
follow-ups to such messages.  When it looks like that thread has reached its
end, I can archive it.

- if it is purely an informational message, I either delete it after
reading, or let it stay if it has some longer life span.  (For instance, an
announcement for a meeting or a seminar that might happen in a few
days/weeks time.)

I do the regular archiving using `auto-folder-alist'.  This is the No. 1
most useful feature of VM for me, which is not available in most other mail
clients.  I can define the auto-folder-alist using clues from the names of
the senders, recipients and subject headings.  I could perhaps use
`vm-virtual-auto-folder-alist' as well.  But I haven't gotten around to
converting my old `auto-folder-alist'.

The overall principle is that my valuable mail is in the archival folders,
where it is easy to find things.  The INBOX is just a waystation in getting
there.

For the messages that are left around in the INBOX, my method involves
periodically cleaning it, by:

- archiving messages that need to be archived, 
- deleting messages that are of no use any more, and
- saving the rest in a compressed version of the INBOX in quarterly chunks,
  e.g., INBOX.2012-1.gz, INBOX.2012-2.gz etc.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to do this cleaning for several years
because the volume of email has grown far too much.  So, currently, I am
developing virtual folder techniques to help me do the cleaning.  For
instance, I now have a "softspam" virtual folder that tries to identify all
the messages that can be deleted.  Some other virtual folders group messages
related to some particular topic so that I can process them more easily
during the "cleaning" process.  But I don't have this fully developed yet.

> For simplicity, let's assume I only have one inbox, say a POP box.  Now I
> defined some virtual folders which can sort out certain mailing lists or
> other regularly arriving messages. But physically they remain in the inbox
> and in this inbox I still have a mixture of private mails and others.  Do
> you have a certain filter for private mails? 

Yes, it might be possible to define virtual folders that identify all the
private mails.  It takes time to develop these virtual folders, and they are
rarely fool-proof because the world keeps changing and you have to keep
adding rules to cover it.

> Or do you use vm-virtual-auto-archive?  

I personally never use auto-archive.  Since the mail I want archived is the
"valuable" mail, it doesn't serve my purpose to archive everything, which is
what auto-archive does.  

The auto-folder-alist variables work for manual archiving (i.e., saving) as
well as for auto-achirving.

Cheers,
Uday