Re: Good mail management techniques?
An interesting approach might be remembrance agents, from http://www.media.mit.edu/~rhodes/RA/ Remembrance Agents are a set of applications that watch over a user's shoulder and suggest information relevant to the current situation. While query-based memory aids help with direct recall, remembrance agents are an augmented associative memory. For example, the word-processor version of the RA continuously updates a list of documents relevant to what's being typed or read in an emacs buffer. These suggested documents can be any text files that might be relevant to what you are currently writing or reading. They might be old emails related to the mail you are currently reading, or abstracts from papers and newspaper articles that discuss the topic of your writing. Has anyone tried this? It's released under GNU but requires emacs which I'm not familiar with :-( Patrick.
Re: Good mail management techniques?
Karsten M. Self kmself@ix.netcom.com writes: on Sun, Sep 09, 2001 at 04:18:53PM -0700, Ross Boylan ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: On Sun, Sep 09, 2001 at 12:12:14PM -0700, Karsten M. Self wrote: . The concept you're proposing has some similarities to ideas espoused by David Gelertner, whose capsule biography will always read Yale professor, computer scientist, and victim of the Unabomber (Theodore Kaczynski). David survived the attempt on his life, though he was permanently injured as a result. On it's face, the idea of organizing by time is different from what I had in mind. However, it may be that the other classification facilities would give me what I was looking for. It might be worth having a look at JWZ's Intertwingle proposal, if you haven't before: http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/misc/199805/intertwingle.html AFAIK, the proposal is as fal as that's gotten. john. -- When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. -- Larry Wall in the perl man page
Re: Good mail management techniques?
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.
REALITY
In the meantime, I use exim to filter my mail into boxes and read it
with mutt. When the individual boxes get so big that performance is
painful, I run the following python script to hack the big ones up and
put them in the archive subdirectory. I make no claim this is best
practice!
To use this, I switch to the directory with my mailboxes, and
(assuming the script is executable) do
./chopy.py box1 box2 boxN
This will ensure that each box is no more than sizeLeft (see below) bytes.
The excess stuff gets turned into things like box1.date.bz2, where
date is an indication of the date of the last message in the archive.
Unless your box is perfectly sorted, you shouldn't take the date too
literally. Then I move the bz2 files into an archive.
#! /usr/bin/python
# Released under GPL. (c) 2001 Ross Boylan
import fcntl,os,re,stat,sys
import pdb
sizeLeft = 15*1024*1024 # Size to leave
pattern = re.compile(r^From \S+ (?Pweekday\w\w\w) (?Pmonth\w\w\w)\
r (?Pday[0-9]{1,2}) \d\d:\d\d:\d\d (?Pyear\d{2,4})$)
patt2 = re.compile(r^Received: from)
blockSize = 1024*1024 # size to transfer
def handleFile(file):
Process a single file
if os.stat(file)[stat.ST_SIZE] sizeLeft :
print %s is not long enough to chop%file
return
fh = open(file, r+)
fh.seek(-sizeLeft, 2)
line = fh.readline() # read to end of partial line
while 1:
pos = fh.tell()
line = fh.readline()
if not line:
break # hit EOF
if line[:5] == From :
#pdb.set_trace()
pass
m = pattern.match(line)
if m:
line = fh.readline()
if patt2.match(line):
dateString = m.group('year')+-+m.group('month')+\
-+m.group('day')
chopFile(fh, file, pos, .+dateString)
return
else:
print Odd. Failed to match on 2nd line. Continuing search.
# note we skip over the 2nd line
print Could not find message start in last %d characters of %s%(
sizeLeft, file)
fh.close()
def chopFile(fh, name, pos, decoration):
Chops file name, open with fh, at pos. Add decoration to name of
new first part
# fh should be open for mod on entry. It will be closed
# by this function
status = fcntl.flock(fh.fileno(), fcntl.LOCK_EX)
if status :
print Couldn't lock , file
fh.close()
return
try:
_chopFile(fh, name, pos, decoration)
finally:
# off with their locks
fh = open(file,r)
status = fcntl.flock(fh.fileno(), fcntl.LOCK_UN)
if status:
print Failed to remove lock for %s%file
fh.close()
def _chopFile(fh, name, pos, decoration):
Chops without worrying about locking
# copy tail
fhshort = open(file+.short, w)
fh.seek(pos)
block = fh.read(blockSize)
while block:
fhshort.write(block)
block = fh.read(blockSize)
fhshort.close()
# and create long start
fh.truncate(pos)
fh.close()
# assign final names
archiveName = file+decoration
os.rename(file, archiveName)
os.rename(file+.short, file)
os.system(bzip2 +archiveName)
print Chopped start of %s to %s%(file, archiveName+.bz2)
# executable part
for file in sys.argv[1:]:
handleFile(file)
Re: Good mail management techniques?
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
Re: Good mail management techniques?
on Sat, Sep 08, 2001 at 10:48:10PM -0700, Ross Boylan ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: On Sun, Sep 02, 2001 at 03:32:02PM +1000, Andrew Pollock wrote: 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. The concept you're proposing has some similarities to ideas espoused by David Gelertner, whose capsule biography will always read Yale professor, computer scientist, and victim of the Unabomber (Theodore Kaczynski). David survived the attempt on his life, though he was permanently injured as a result. Data on Lifestreams, Gelertner's project, is somewhat hard to find, the following provides an overview: http://www.fend.es/members/magazine/march97/lifeb.html There is a set of free software projects which may be of interest, this page details them: http://www.dominopower.com/issues/issue199905/futures002.html Among them: - Yoga, intended as a Lotus Notes replacement (assuming the Lotus position). http://samba.anu.edu.au/gnuotes/ - Casbah, designed to be (take a deep breath) an application development, Web server, email, discussion group, calendaring and scheduling, content management, personal organizer groupware product. It's modeled on both Lotus Notes and Lifestreams, a project launched by David Gelertner. http://ntlug.org/casbah/ - GNU Gather. Formerly known as PINN. REALITY In the meantime, I use exim to filter my mail into boxes and read it with mutt. When the individual boxes get so big that performance is painful, I run the following python script to hack the big ones up and put them in the archive subdirectory. I make no claim this is best practice! It's close to what I do. 'grep' and 'zgrep' as search tools on compressed archives (mutt handles these with a patch, but doesn't deal with simultaneous write access well) is largely sufficient for my needs. Cheers. -- Karsten M. Self kmself@ix.netcom.com http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of Gestalt don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org Free Dmitry! Boycott Adobe! Repeal the DMCA!http://www.freesklyarov.org Geek for Hirehttp://kmself.home.netcom.com/resume.html pgpWEg3PuzB2C.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Good mail management techniques?
On Sun, Sep 09, 2001 at 12:12:14PM -0700, Karsten M. Self wrote: . The concept you're proposing has some similarities to ideas espoused by David Gelertner, whose capsule biography will always read Yale professor, computer scientist, and victim of the Unabomber (Theodore Kaczynski). David survived the attempt on his life, though he was permanently injured as a result. Data on Lifestreams, Gelertner's project, is somewhat hard to find, the following provides an overview: http://www.fend.es/members/magazine/march97/lifeb.html On it's face, the idea of organizing by time is different from what I had in mind. However, it may be that the other classification facilities would give me what I was looking for. It doesn't seem things have gotten too far, though. A few details below. There is a set of free software projects which may be of interest, this page details them: http://www.dominopower.com/issues/issue199905/futures002.html Among them: - Yoga, intended as a Lotus Notes replacement (assuming the Lotus position). http://samba.anu.edu.au/gnuotes/ - Casbah, designed to be (take a deep breath) an application development, Web server, email, discussion group, calendaring and scheduling, content management, personal organizer groupware product. It's modeled on both Lotus Notes and Lifestreams, a project launched by David Gelertner. http://ntlug.org/casbah/ Link doesn't work. - GNU Gather. Formerly known as PINN. Can't find any trace of this on GNU's site. Also there was a reference to www.lifestreams.com (as I recall); that didn't work either.
Re: Good mail management techniques?
Any reason for the CC's on this mail? I'm leaving them intact, though I tend to post directly to list for list responses. on Sun, Sep 09, 2001 at 04:18:53PM -0700, Ross Boylan ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: On Sun, Sep 09, 2001 at 12:12:14PM -0700, Karsten M. Self wrote: . The concept you're proposing has some similarities to ideas espoused by David Gelertner, whose capsule biography will always read Yale professor, computer scientist, and victim of the Unabomber (Theodore Kaczynski). David survived the attempt on his life, though he was permanently injured as a result. Data on Lifestreams, Gelertner's project, is somewhat hard to find, the following provides an overview: http://www.fend.es/members/magazine/march97/lifeb.html On it's face, the idea of organizing by time is different from what I had in mind. However, it may be that the other classification facilities would give me what I was looking for. It doesn't seem things have gotten too far, though. A few details below. [Casbah] http://ntlug.org/casbah/ Link doesn't work. - GNU Gather. Formerly known as PINN. Can't find any trace of this on GNU's site. Also there was a reference to www.lifestreams.com (as I recall); that didn't work either. My own impression of LN was that it somewhat fit this description as well: didn't work well. The problem as I see it is that this isn't a problem space that maps well to an organized solution. I've heard and read snippets of Gelertner's ideas from time to time, and suspect I only half get it. The keys that *do* make sense are: - Hierarchical categorization is ultimately futile, *if* only a single hierarchy can be applied. - Allowing multiple hierarchies my provide more utility, but ultimately even these efforts run into the dual problems of: - Categorizing data is itself an expense of the system. You end up spending some amount of time/effort in applying arbitrary associations to content. - Freedom to create later, arbitrary, associations is highly valuable. Systems such as Everything2 and Wiki are useful in that they allow usage patterns to develop through data. Interestingly, Wiki tradition leans strongly *away* from time-marking data, while this is Gelertner's primary ordering basis (I've had this argument on Meatball Wiki). - Indexing (and searchability) is more useful than ordering. Don't structure your data, instead, structure your *views* of it. The Web itself is an exemplar of this: the Web isn't structured (though indices such as Yahoo! dMoz overlay structure on it), rather, great utility is provided by search engines. The best of these (Google, Teoma, Vivisimo) utilize the structure and patterns of the Web itself to impart more meaning and value. This is greatly helped by: - A rough document structure. There are certain elements of a document (any document) which are relatively constant: creation (and sometimes access/modification) date, author, title, abstract or summary, and content. There may also be an intended recipient. A minimal tagging structure (email and Usenet lend themselves strongly to this, HTML/XML/SGML somewhat less so) to enforce this structure helps tremendously. - Relationships between the documents themselves. Parent/Child relationships in mail and Usenet, links and URLs in web documents. - The indexing system must take advantage of these features of the data. Ultimately, however, a large portion of the structuring of the system comes from the users themselves. As such, there's only so much any one tool or set of tools can do. A better system provides minimal ordering in the gross sense of the data -- it has to be remembered that database != relational database. Any collection of data can be a database. Text is poorly suited to most relational measures anyway, what with fixed record lengths, poor support of BLOBS, and other issues. File-based storage is actually a pretty decent fit, particularly with an advanced, hash-based, journaling filesystem (e.g.: Reiserfs)[1]. In the mail front, one of the better toolsets from a net flexibility standpoint is the 'mh' mailhandling macros. Data are simply files, streamed to and from stdin and stdout. Doesn't get much easier than that. The overview of the Lifestreams project that I found suggests that it's essentially built around a similar architecture. http://www.fend.es/members/magazine/march97/lifeb.html Notes: 1. I've got my own archive of some 125,000+ files, posts over a four year period to an online web discussion. A full directory listing under Reiserfs takes six seconds from a dead start (no cache, output to /dev/null). Once caching has been enabled, the directory can be scanned in about 1.6 seconds: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:archive]$ time /bin/ls -U | wc -l
Re: Good mail management techniques?
On (02/09/01 15:32), Andrew Pollock wrote:
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?
I don't sort into folders. It's too time consuming to set up a new
folder/rule for each topic and my mailer already
handles sorting by threads/sender/subject anyway - plus i can just grep
content if necessary.
I do archive read messages every week. I have attached the perl and bash
scripts I wrote to do that. Either script works by itself, but the bash
script will choke if your maildirs are big.
Note that I am not a perl hacker so take the code with a grain of salt.
The scripts are made for Maildir style mailboxes. If anyone has
anything for mbox I could use it (I guess you could just archive
the whole mbox and start afresh, but that would archive unread messages
as well).
g
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# small script to archive maildirs
# may be some tricks. [EMAIL PROTECTED] 20010809
use strict;
use File::Copy;
my $maildir = /home/ii/Maildir;
my $archive = /home/ii/Maildir/old;
# make new maildir
my (undef, undef, undef, $mday, $mon, $year, undef, undef, undef) = localtime;
my $map = sprintf %4d%02d%02d, $year+1900, $mon+1, $mday;
print Making archive .$map. ...\n;
my $box = $archive./.$map;
(-d $box) or `maildirmake $box`;
# move message to new maildir change to mv after testing
foreach (glob $maildir./cur/*)
{
#print $_.\n;
move($_, $box./cur/) or die could not move $_\n ;
}
# tarball archive
print tarring archive .$box. ...\n;
chdir $archive or die Could not chdir to $archive\n;
`tar -cvzf $map.tar.gz $map`;
# remove maildir
print removing maildir ...\n;
`rm -r $box`;
0;
#!/bin/bash
# small script to archive maildirs
# may be some tricks. [EMAIL PROTECTED] 20010809
# bash version
MAILDIR=/home/ii/Maildir;
ARCHIVE=/home/ii/Maildir/old;
# make new maildir
DATE=`date +%Y%m%d`
echo making archive $DATE ...
BOX=$ARCHIVE/$DATE;
[ -d $BOX ] || maildirmake $BOX
# move message to new maildir # change to mv after testing ...
echo copying messages ...
mv $MAILDIR/cur/* $BOX/cur/
# tarball archive
echo tarring maildir ...
cd $ARCHIVE
tar -cvzf $DATE.tar.gz $DATE
# remove archive
echo removing maildir ...
rm -r $BOX
echo done
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Description: PGP signature
Re: Good mail management techniques?
On 2001-09-08 04:15:49, Angus D Madden wrote:
but the bash script will choke if your maildirs are big.
echo copying messages ...
mv $MAILDIR/cur/* $BOX/cur/
Try instead: find $MAILDIR/cur -type f print0 | xargs -0i mv '{}' $BOX/cur
/Allan
--
Allan M. Wind email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
P.O. Box 2022 finger: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (GPG/PGP)
Woburn, MA 01888-0022
USA
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Description: PGP signature
Re: Good mail management techniques?
On 2001-09-07 19:13:13, Allan M. Wind wrote:
On 2001-09-08 04:15:49, Angus D Madden wrote:
but the bash script will choke if your maildirs are big.
echo copying messages ...
mv $MAILDIR/cur/* $BOX/cur/
Try instead: find $MAILDIR/cur -type f print0 | xargs -0i mv '{}' $BOX/cur
There should of course have been '-print0' and you don't really need
the -type f as you would have files in the cur directory.
/Allan
--
Allan M. Wind email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
P.O. Box 2022 finger: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (GPG/PGP)
Woburn, MA 01888-0022
USA
pgpJtHLA5esOl.pgp
Description: PGP signature
Re: Good mail management techniques?
On (02/09/01 15:32), Andrew Pollock wrote: 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? :0: * ^TO_.*debian-user.* Lists/Debian/user`date +%Y%m` Then I have a script that extracts all the probable mailbox names from my .procmailrc, and puts them in my mutt mailboxes file. No idea whether pine will let you do the same, but it might. Ailbhe mutt devotee. -- Homepage: http://ailbhe.ossifrage.net/
Re: Good mail management techniques?
On Thu, 2001-09-06 at 10:01, Ailbhe Leamy wrote: 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? :0: * ^TO_.*debian-user.* Lists/Debian/user`date +%Y%m` Then I have a script that extracts all the probable mailbox names from my .procmailrc, and puts them in my mutt mailboxes file. No idea whether pine will let you do the same, but it might. Pine will treat any folder under the mail root (~/mail for me) as a folder. Ross Burton
Re: Good mail management techniques?
On Thu, 6 Sep 2001, Ailbhe Leamy wrote: Then I have a script that extracts all the probable mailbox names from my .procmailrc, and puts them in my mutt mailboxes file. No idea whether pine will let you do the same, but it might. Pine builds them as needed: I found this one out after cosmic rays twiddled the bits in my .procmailrc (honest! it wasn't like a TYPO or anything... :) Ailbhe mutt devotee. -- EMACS == Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping Who is John Galt? [EMAIL PROTECTED], that's who!
Good mail management techniques?
Hi, I'm just wondering how people manage their email... I've basically got a .procmailrc happening, which shoves each mailing list into it's own file in my home directory, and Pine, IMAP (via Webmail) accesses it all nicely. I have looked at Mutt, but being a Pine weeny it freaks me out everytime I try to use it too much. My main inbox is in /var/spool/mail 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
Re: Good mail management techniques?
On 2001-09-02 15:32:02, Andrew Pollock wrote: 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? If you deliver mail in maildir format (procmail can), you can (easily) use standard unix tools to manipulate your mail. Another option would be to rework your procmail filters to include filtering by age and post-process your mbox files via formail. /Allan -- Allan M. Wind email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] P.O. Box 2022 finger: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (GPG/PGP) Woburn, MA 01888-0022 USA pgpwF3Qanoi9c.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Good mail management techniques?
On 02 Sep 2001 15:32:02 +1000, Andrew Pollock wrote: Hi, I'm just wondering how people manage their email... * Each mail incomming message is triple duplicated. * Mail is filtered on my primary mail server by several hundred procmail rulesets which filter in to groups by topic, month, year * Mail is refiltered on a backup mail box according to the same rules * Mail is normally read from a third system which also refilters. I very rarely lose any mail by doing it this way :) Pine most certainly does support multilevel folders... --jcm
