On Feb 28, 2011, at 8:15 AM, Derek Martin wrote: > On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 10:01:01AM +0100, Joost Kremers wrote: >>>>> I don't think having a specific feature in Mutt is necessary or >>>>> desirable to achieve this. You can easily have mail from multiple >>>>> accounts delivered to your mailspool using getmail or fetchmail. >>>> >>>> except that that downloads the mail to your local machine. >>> >>> Not if you run it on your IMAP server. >> >> but it still puts all your mail into a single mail box, which entirely >> defeats >> the purpose of a unified inbox. > > I don't see that at all... The purpose of having a unified inbox is > to present all of your new mail to you simultaneously. This does > exactly that. >
Actually, a "unified inbox" (as provided by Apple Mail.app or Postbox) presents all my new mail in one view, however, the mail actually remains in separate inboxes behind the scenes. A column in the view tells me where the mail actually resides. That way, mail can remain in physically separate accounts/inboxes, but can be seen in one view. Postbox takes this a bit further by allowing the user to create arbitrary number of groups -- so I could see inbox1 and inbox2 in a virtual view called "work" and inbox3 and inbox4 in a virtual view called "gambling," if I so wanted. >>>> > lacking in some way or other. Unified inbox is something I > specifically DO NOT want, as it removes a certain amount of context > from the mail-handling process for me. > > .. As noted above, the context is provided by a column in the view. My unified inbox in Apple Mail looks like so -- Subject Date Recd Mailbox ========================= ========== ================= Derek Martin 8:18 AM Inbox - punk.kish Re: unified inbox ------------------------------------------------------ Someone Else 7:14 AM Inbox - punkish Re: logging in BC makes.. ------------------------------------------------------ I hope the above doesn't come out garbled. In the view above, I can see emails from two inboxes (even as they remain in their respected inboxes). In addition, since 2 lines are devoted to each mail, I can see the subject below the sender's name. Actually, Sparrow, a new, Gmail-specific IMAP only client (soon to expand to other IMAPs also) even shows the first couple of lines from the message text as well. Rather useful. Additional Note: ================ Part of the issue is that I haven't really understood how Mutt works. In true Unix philosophy, mutt is (was) designed to do only one thing (reading and replying to my mail), while other tools did other things. More and more, tools are doing one "conceptual" thing (working with my mail) even though behind the scenes it is doing many things. The user, me, is not worrying about what is happening behind the scenes. More and more programs don't even require the user to interact with the physical location and storage of the content (iPhoto, Mail, and more programs in the new iOS paradigm). You open the program and your content appears there. Even if mutt works with the IMAP server, my mail is actually "stored" (cached) in my mutt cache location. I would like that to continue, particularly since I don't trust any IMAP servers (Google could vanish tomorrow -- in fact, just yesterday there was a report of some users finding their emails had vanished -- Google was working on fixing it), but I also like the ubiquitous availability of IMAP. The solution, for me, is to use IMAP, but to sync all my email locally, so I can have the best of both worlds. Will get there soon hopefully. Thanks all. Puneet.
