Re: How do you manage debian mails on your mailbox?
Nilesh Patra <nilesh@nileshpatra.info> writes:
> So, two questions:-
> - Do you use your primary email address for debian stuff as well,
> or is it a different one?
My work mail goes to a separate inbox and a whole separate email system
(which I have never bothered to set up protocol access to and just read
via webmail, since my job doesn't use email very heavily). Other than
that, all email I receive for anything in my life, including Debian, goes
into a single inbox.
> - Do you have any sensible way to cope up with so many mails from
> different mailing lists and not potentially miss out on something
> important?
I've been using Gnus inside Emacs as my mail reader since, good lord,
1994, and one of the things that it supports is what it calls "split
rules." Gnus started life as a Usenet newsreader (which is part of what I
love about it), and therefore thinks about the world in terms of
newsgroups. This is very similar to but not entirely equivalent to the
typical email folder concept, and one of the ways in which it's different
is that Gnus (when using the nnml backend rather than something like IMAP)
does a preprocessing step on incoming email and sorts it into the
appropriate group first. This is basically equivalent to filter rules in
a typical email client except they're strongly emphasized in Gnus and (at
least in my opinion) the tools for managing them are superior. It's very
similar to the way procmail works, but uses elisp as the configuration
syntax.
So I have a set of split rules that sort mail out into various folders
that, because I'm an old Usenet person, are named sort of like newsgroups,
some before spam filtering (I'm still using bogofilter, which still mostly
works) and some after spam filtering. So, for example, I'm responding to
this message in what appears in my email client to be a "group" named
lists.debian.project. Your message was sorted into that group by the
following line in my split rule configuration:
("list-id" "debian-project\\.lists\\.debian" "lists.debian.project")
If someone were to send me direct email to my regular email address, that
would show up in a group called mail.personal. But if they send direct
mail to my Debian address, that shows up in a group called project.debian
due to the following split rule:
(to "rra@\\([a-z0-9-]*\\.\\)?debian\\.org" "project.debian")
However, before that rule are a few other rules that take precedence and
sort a few specific types of mail into different folders because I handle
them differently:
("x-loop" "owner@bugs\\.debian\\.org" "project.debian.bugs")
("x-mailer" "reportbug" "project.debian.bugs")
("from" "noreply@release.debian.org" "project.debian.packages")
("x-debian" "dak" "project.debian.packages")
("x-pts-package" ".*" "project.debian.packages")
("x-testing-watch-package" ".*" "project.debian.packages")
This allows me to maintain mental context when reading each "group,"
choose not to read things that are lower priority until later, and see
more important mail first because I split it out into higher-urgency
groups.
I have about 500 lines of split rules, but that's accumulated over nearly
30 years of using this way of reading email. I update them regularly and
I'm in the middle of changing my mind about how granular I want the split
rules to be and consolidating more things into a smaller number of groups,
but they don't require much work to maintain. I have a group that's
designed to catch mail from mailing lists that I subscribed to but didn't
add a split rule for, and I go through and add split rules for those
messages, or things that show up in my personal inbox that I don't want
there, from time to time. For example, right now I have about five
messages from order notifications for takeout from local restaurants that
are sitting in my inbox waiting for me to have five minutes to write split
rules so that they sort into mail.food instead.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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