Author: Chris Aitken Date: To: Hampshire LUG Discussion List Subject: Re: [Hampshire] [OT] Email inbox tidiness?
> > I wonder how folks here on the list keep their endless streams of > > emails tidy.
>
> ... snip ...
>
> > What are others thoughts?
>
> I filter mailing lists and everything addresses directly to me comes
> into my inbox. When I deal with a mail I manually file it. In this way
> my inbox has also become my todo list.
>
> I use IMAP to store the mail so I can get at it from anywhere. In
> order to keep things manageable I have a shell script which goes
> through my folders and moves old emails into a duplicate folder
> structure based on their age. The script keeps the newest 50 emails in
> each folder and each year recreates the folder structure.
>
> For example these are the folders that exist for family emails:
>
> /home/work/mail/Maildir/.Archive.2004.Family
> /home/work/mail/Maildir/.Archive.2005.Family
> /home/work/mail/Maildir/.Archive.2006.Family
> /home/work/mail/Maildir/.Archive.2007.Family
> /home/work/mail/Maildir/.Family
>
> The only manual thing I do is file email which was addressed to
> me directly after I deal with it. For me most of it has to be automated
> otherwise I wont do it. By breaking the mail into folders based on age
> I limit their size and I find that the search function of my mail client
> does the job fine.
I used to file emails in great streams of folders like that when I had
my own server. I always kept emails 'just in case' then I found a good
trick to help in the sorting - sort by name, then you can get rid of
rakes of emails purely by thinking 'do they say much that is useful?'.
