notmuch and mailing lists

notmuch and mailing lists

[Sean Whitton]

Hello,

I was wondering whether anyone who previously read mailing lists via
NNTP has stopped doing this after starting to use notmuch.

I've not yet used NNTP to read mailing lists myself, but I think there
are limitations to the way I currently read lists, and was wondering
whether it is worth exploring the NNTP approach, or trying to come up
with notmuch-based workflow improvements.

Kindly CC me on replies.

-- 
Sean Whitton

Re: notmuch and mailing lists

[Reto]

On Fri, May 01, 2020 at 12:30:28PM -0700, Sean Whitton wrote:
> I've not yet used NNTP to read mailing lists myself, but I think there
> are limitations to the way I currently read lists

What are you missing exactly?
If we know what your actual problems are there might be better solutions forthcoming.

Re: notmuch and mailing lists

[Eric Wong]

Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I was wondering whether anyone who previously read mailing lists via
> NNTP has stopped doing this after starting to use notmuch.

Fwiw, I have some slrn spool to Maildir translators here which should
work with notmuch:

Perl: https://yhbt.net/public-inbox.git/tree/scripts/slrnspool2maildir
(It still uses the Email::* namespace, which I'm slowly getting
 rid of in public-inbox due to performance and inactive upstream...)

Ruby: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190104013522.stng6gwauwnr6wbi@starla/
(doesn't do any header rewriting)

> I've not yet used NNTP to read mailing lists myself, but I think there
> are limitations to the way I currently read lists, and was wondering
> whether it is worth exploring the NNTP approach, or trying to come up
> with notmuch-based workflow improvements.

Not directly related to notmuch:

I'm planning on expanding public-inbox to include a local client
tool which can index, search, and optionally cache NNTP and HTTP
messages from any NNTP and public-inbox HTTP instances.  Maybe
IMAP, too...

Re: notmuch and mailing lists

[Sean Whitton]

Hello Reto,

On Sat 02 May 2020 at 03:13pm +02, Reto wrote:

> On Fri, May 01, 2020 at 12:30:28PM -0700, Sean Whitton wrote:
>> I've not yet used NNTP to read mailing lists myself, but I think there
>> are limitations to the way I currently read lists
>
> What are you missing exactly?
> If we know what your actual problems are there might be better solutions forthcoming.

Well, I would like to be able to handle a higher volume of messages
faster.  I think that I am typically reluctant to subscribe to new lists
because I know that I'm not efficient at processing the mail.

People who use NNTP to read mailing lists talk about the following sorts
of things which speed things up:

- efficient killfiles/filters
- manually killing subthreads
- expiration/catching up
- browsing lists without going through the process of subscription
  and/or downloading archives

I'd be interested to hear what techniques people have for making notmuch
capable of getting through mailing list mail faster.  I find that
notmuch is great for practising Inbox Zero on personal mail, and for
searching to find old mail, but I haven't made it especially good for
dealing with discussion forums yet.

I've come up with a few ideas myself in the past few days but they're
fairly simple.

-- 
Sean Whitton