Nilesh Patra <nil...@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" "nore...@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 (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>