fjellstad.org

Following the previous post, I’ve been playing around with labeling my email. Mutt has really good labeling support, mostly because of its flexibility. With it, I can pretty much do anything I need using labels (add, delete, modify, limit views to a given label etc), so it has become my primary email client these days.

I used to use Kontact, and I still like some of its functionality (like setting up search folders), but not being able to edit and add labels make it hard to use. It’s also not that stable when you’re using imap. Looking forward to trying it out again when KDE 4 turns stable. Hopefully, it is more stable there.

Being, the lazy bum that I am, I really don’t want to manually add labels to email from people I know when the computer can do as good a job as I can. Enter maildrop. One thing that I noticed was when I wanted to the system to add multiple labels to a given email because multiple people was on the mail list. I therefore wrote the following maildrop rule (procmail users can probably write a similar rule for their system):

# Get address from the From, To, and Cc line
foreach /^(From|To|Cc): .*/
{
    foreach (getaddr $MATCH) =~ /.+/
    {
        ADDR=tolower($MATCH)
        # check if the address is in the label file
        # label file has a key/value pairing looking like this
        # example@example.com exlabel
        # where first part is the address and second part is the label
        TMPLABEL=`grep $ADDR labels`
        if ( $RETURNCODE == 0 )
        {
            # if message already has a label, keep it
            LABEL = `echo $TMPLABEL | cut -d' ' -f2`
            if ( /^X-Label: (.*)/ )
            {
                xfilter "/usr/bin/reformail -I 'X-Label: $MATCHLABEL, $LABEL'"
            }
            else
            {
                xfilter "/usr/bin/reformail -I 'X-Label: $LABEL'"
            }
        }
    }
}

So far, it’s been working really well.

One of the problems of organizing your email is how to do it. I don’t really like deleting old email. Mostly because I like to go back and read some of the older email. One problem with that is since the outgoing email (from me) got stored in the Sent folder, I didn’t do a really good job at storing those email. So the threads and context are often broken, especially if people didn’t quote the whole email (and people who used email back before 2000 did a much better job at trimming quotes). Another problem was, how do I file it the email? I used to file everything job related into a job, anything academic into school, anything from friends into letters. Of course, then I start getting email from coworkers not job related. Do they go into jobs or friends? Same with fellow students…

Last summer I read two brilliant (related) posts on email handling: one from Scott Yang and the other one from Aristotle Pagaltzis. Basically, stop filing your email. Just archive everything (similar to the Gmail model). Don’t worry about categorizing. Trust your email client (or search functions) to retrieve your email.

I’ve been using this scheme since last summer, and so far, it has worked brilliantly. I keep all my email conversations in my inbox until the conversation is finished. Then I archive it, without thinking about where to file a specific thread. Mailing lists are special in that they go automatically into their own folders, but then again I don’t really subscribe to many mailing lists anymore (mostly security related). Otherwise, I just get them through the gmane service. One thing I did modify was that I set up my system to automatically archive the archive by year. So that December 31 at 23:59 (or so), everything in archive gets moved to archive.YEAR.

I do miss some of the features that Google introduced with gmail, though. The labeling facility is gmail is pretty brilliant. So, you can manually give an email a given label, and you can then search on that label. I miss that functionality. You can use search folders (in kmail, that I use and probably other email clients), but it’s not the same. One problem is that some people change their email, and then you need to update the search parameter. It would be much easier if you could just click on a button that said tag this as that. One problem would be that the tag wouldn’t work across email client unless there was a unified way for email client to read the tags, say x-tag or x-label. Of course, this mean that the email itself would have to be modified by the client, although some clients already do this.

In any case, currently the new email handling scheme works fine, and certainly makes me more efficient.