--On Wednesday, September 15, 2004 00:34:41 -0400 Jeff Koch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Your response is exactly why I used the term. I, and apparently a few others, do not want to pre-sort our mail into folders but like to work with a list of mail as received and dispose of the mail based upon the subject line.
Well, I, and apparently a few others, get far too many mailing-list messages to want to try to handle them all in a single inbox. Since I'm using Cyrus IMAP, I have sieve delivery-time filtering to easily sort them into a variety of IMAP submailboxes. And I use Mulberry, which lets me flag -all- of the mailboxes I want to monitor and have it tell me when there's mail available instead of having to check manually. (I used to use ML which also allows virtual sub-mailboxes based on client-side filter matching.)
Sub-mailboxes are one of the major advantages of IMAP over POP3. Delivery-time sieve makes the filtering easy and keeps it purely within the server; but even without it, client-side filtering and message moving can be done cheaply without downloading more than the headers of each message. Many MUAs have that level of filtering support.
IMAP can also provide various server-side searching capabilities (some of which are optional extensions). That would allow an MUA to display only those messages that match; while still only downloading the headers to display. I've never really been restricted to POP; so I don't know whether current POP servers have similar capabilities.
Likewise I can't imagine anyone wanting to store every single email that comes in on this list and the others I subscribe to - but, hey, each to his own.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I don't store every email that comes on this list. At least not locally. They do stay on my server until I've had a chance to scan subject lines, decide which ones to read, and delete anything that doesn't have something that I particularly want to save.
I find this to be orders of magnititude easier to do when each mailing list is delivered into its own sub-mailbox. But that's partially because I'm subscribed to so many lists; and the total volume of list-related messages is fairly high. With each list having its own inbox, subject tagging is just annoyingly useless noise.
If you are really opposed to using sub-mailboxes, then my advice would be to use an MUA that lets you set up client-side filters (based on List-Id:) that change the appearance of the entry in the message list. Color, font, some small icon, whatever. That lets you have your mixed input with list-specific visuals without forcing the rest of us to put up with the annoyances that Subject: tagging causes.
-Pat
