Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Loris Bennett" <loris.bennett@fu-berlin.de>
> Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2018 09:34:10 +0200
> 
> > The oldest email in my INBOX is from 18 years ago, and I still need it
> > from time to time.  I guess time-based expiration is not for me.
> 
> The default is for articles not to expire - you have to mark an email
> explicitly as expirable for it to get deleted at some point.

If that is true (Robert seems to say it isn't by default), then Gnus
is not different from Rmail, where I explicitly delete messages I
don't want to keep (and filing them to an archive folder by default
marks it as deleted), and then expunge my INBOX once a week to
physically remove those marked for deletion.

> Does an email from my wife about school need to be filed in "family"
> or "school"?

At worst, you will have to search both folders, which is still better
than searching all of them.  And when that happens, it's an
opportunity to rethink the way you organized your folders.

> For this reason I find myself thinking that just one or two folders
> with a good search mechanism would be a more flexible solution.

When you have a good idea what is you are searching form,
i.e. remember some unique phrase or some other attribute, then folders
are entirely irrelevant, because you can search all of your archives
in milliseconds.  Folders are only of help when you don't have a good
idea what to search for, and only a very vague recollection of the
issue you want to find.

> PS: Eli, shouldn't that 18-year-old mail in your INBOX have been filed
> away into one of your two dozen folders by now 😉? Or is it maybe one of
> those tricky corner-cases 😅?

Filing mail away means it's out of sight.  There are things I don't
want to be out of my sight, ever.