Re: Using R-mail in Emacs

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

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Robert Pluim <rpluim@gmail.com>
>> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
>> Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 16:34:14 +0200
>>
>> > You mean, Gnus can know when you have no more use of some email
>> > message and it can be discarded?  How does it do that?
>>
>> It does (at least) time based auto-expiration. Probably score based as
>> well [1], plus you can mark messages as expirable/unexpirable.
>
> 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.

>> > When you have no good idea what to search for, having related email
>> > messages together in the same folder will help finding what you are
>> > looking for faster.  So I find that some classification is still
>> > useful, although I have search capabilities set up that can find any
>> > email in split-seconds.
>>
>> Iʼm also a fan of the 'big ball of email' model. Filing stuff into
>> sub-folders just makes me forget where I put it.
>
> I don't have a lot of folders: less than 2 dozen.  Rmail is customized
> to automatically guess the right folder given certain keywords in a
> message, and it guesses right with high probability.  My experience is
> that the classification into a small number of folders helps a lot to
> find material, so I guess to each one their own.

For many years I have used a less than a dozen folders with Gnus
splitting mechanism for sorting incoming mail, although lately I have
moved to server-side rules to allow me to read mail more selectively on
devices without Gnus.  However, I feel the many-folder approach does
have some drawbacks.  Does an email from my wife about school need to be
filed in "family" or "school"?  Similar but more subtle situations occur
with my work mail.  For this reason I find myself thinking that just one
or two folders with a good search mechanism would be a more flexible
solution.  I've had a look at mu4e but the whole offline IMAP
construction puts me off a bit.  I always thought it was necessary
because IMAP is fundamentally just slow, but searching through my mail
using an Outlook web client is, to my chagrin as a bit of a FOSS
die-hard, extremely fast.  Does anyone know why that should be?

Cheers,

Loris

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 😅?

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