Re: List traffic

Excerpts from Yeb Havinga's message of jue may 13 15:06:53 -0400 2010:

> Now I made a new gmail account, subscribed to all lists with some volume
> and let it all message per message come into the inbox. Together with
> thunderbird/imap this works quite nicely. With filters it's possible to
> tag interesting messages (like does the To: contain my email? -> tag it
> so it becomes green). Now I only need to view unread mails, (by thread
> or date), read some messages and then ctrl-shift-c - all read.
>
> My $0.02 - I like the whole 'don't sort, search' (or how did they call
> it?) just let the inbox fill up, google is fast enough. What would be
> really interesting is to have some extra 'tags/headers' added to the
> emails (document classification with e.g. self organizing map/kohonen),
> so my local filters could make labels based on that, instead of perhaps
> badly spelled keywords in subjects or message body.

Yeah, this approach is interesting. A few days ago I started using Sup
( http://sup.rubyforge.org/ ) to manage my email, and after a rather
lengthy warm-up process, I find it a lot more comfortable than Mutt (or
anything else I've tried earlier, for that matter). I particularly like
the multiple buffer approach, avoiding the need for switching between
several Mutt instances, one for each mailbox.

So it's almost like gmail: you get fast search, labelling, and a
thread-based approach rather than message-based. As with gmail, you can
"mute" threads that are not interesting to you, so that if any email
arrives later to that thread, you will not see it unless you actively
look for it. An old (unmuted) thread receiving a new message jumps back
at the top of the list; and you can dismiss stuff as "archived" with a
single keystroke, and it will stop polluting your immediate environment,
but you can search for it. And it's pretty *fast* with searches (uses
Xapian as backend).

It's clearly a programmer's MUA -- if you want automatic labelling, you
better be prepared to write some Ruby code. I have already written some
simple rules that get me the trivial labels for pgsql lists and such; I
have also ported the Perl moderation script I used, and the main
advantage is that it's a tad faster (though I spent a lot more time
writing that function than I'll ever save actually doing moderation --
but hey, I managed to learn some Ruby in the process).

It is rather immature though, so I can't recommend it unless you're
prepared to deal with that.
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