Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

["Loris Bennett" <loris.bennett@fu-berlin.de>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> 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.

I think Robert is incorrect here. In the documentation here

  https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Expiring-Mail.html

it says

  "Gnus will not delete your old, read mail. Unless you ask it to, of
  course."

>> 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.

The above is, indeed, me rethinking.

> 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.

My problem is that there doesn't seem to be a pure IMAP solution for
Emacs with which I can search 'in milliseconds'.  A worst case for me is
more like 10 seconds, although ultimately I can also live with that.

>> 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.

Cheers,

Loris

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