Re: Good mail management techniques?

[Erik Steffl <steffl@bigfoot.com>]

Ross Boylan wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Sep 02, 2001 at 03:32:02PM +1000, Andrew Pollock wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm just wondering how people manage their email...
> >
> ....
> > The main problem I have is that each mailbox/folder/whatever you want to call
> > it, grows without bounds. I wouldn't mind something to automatically shoved mail
> > in a folder for each month or something like that, but I don't think that
> > IMAP/Pine etc support multilevel folders, or do they?
> >
> > Anyway, I'm just interested in seeing how other people do it, and what is
> > considered "best practise"
> >
> > Andrew
> >
> 
> First the blue-sky dreams, then the reality:
> 
> DREAMS
> I think the real solution is to put mail in a real database; I've read
> some discussion that Sylpheed (maybe) and one other program (whose
> name I've forgotten) can do this.
> 
> I've long thought that the folder metaphor for mail is inadequate; I
> would prefer a more flexible scheme for classifying mail.  It would
> have two properties: first, each piece of mail could belong to several
> classifications, so that, for example, mail concerning computers and
> politics could be classified under both.  Mail on a mailing list that
> referred specifically to my questions or interests could be on the
> list and under personal.  And so on.
> 
> Second, I'd like to see hieararchical classifications, e.g., computers
> includes debian includes debian-user.  Then if I did a search for
> topic x it would automatically include all subtopics.  We can do
> hierarchies with folders now, but we can't do the folder and all
> subfolders logic.
...

  I wonder whether anybody tried it already (in publicly accessible
project). Shouldn't be too hard to create db back-end for one of the
imap servers. anybody knows about such a beast?

	erik