[Alpine-info] Dumb beginner's question

[Joshua Miller]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 1:33 AM, Andraž 'ruskie' Levstik
<ruskie at codemages.net> wrote:

> :2011-01-17T13:09:Matt Ackeret:

>

>> Yes, I admit this could be thought of as a limitation to alpine, but the

>> lack of 'smart mailboxes' (meta searches that search many folders at once)

>> is one reason I keep _most_ everything in one mailbox.  (I admittedly have

>> a "suspected spam" mailbox, and a "work" mailbox..  Those, along with INBOX

>> and sent-mail-* once in a while, are the main mailboxes I use.)

>>

>> So to be able to search for stuff, it's easier to just keep it in the INBOX.

>>

>> Plus, doesn't IMAP already get "just the new ones" after it's started up?

>> It's really only the startup time that's really slow (~20 seconds) for me.

>>

>> Yes, I do go on nuke-old-mail sessions every once in a while.

>

> You could run a local IMAP server(dovecot comes to mind) that does

> virtual folders. Then you could still have mails separated in various

> folders yet merged together in whatever virtual folders you want(i.e.

> you could have new mails where it shows only new mails across all

> folders, have all mails that lists each and every mail in each folder

> etc...).


Thanks for the tip! I'm definitely going to look into this more. I didn't
see any docs for this on the main doc page for Dovecot. Google to
the rescue, for those interested:

http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Virtual

I roll my mail off every 6months or so (rename the inbox and sent
mail folders), and that always ends up breaking some threads. Using
the virtual mailboxes would be a great way to search across
mailboxes, and dovecot's indexing should make that pretty snappy.

For most day-to-day views of subsets of mail, I frequently make use
of alpines select-and-zoom. I've frequently wished I could do so
across both my inbox (or wherever others want to store the bulk
of their recent mail) and sent mail folders... this would fit the bill
perfectly!


As for big INBOX versus small INBOX, it seems like a vi versus
emacs discussion. They each work very very well for some people,
and they each have a difficult time seeing how the other group could
put up with working that other way.

I'm in the vi camp, and my biggest emacs complain is the keybindings,
which people say can be changed... but why would i do that if I really
like vi (14 years of using vi(m) has made me quite handy with it too)?

And I'm in the big INBOX camp, and while I could split my mail
out to lots of smaller folders, and use a virtual folder to regain an
overall view, why is it wrong to just keep the big INBOX? And
vice-versa: others could have one big INBOX, and have a view
of just their unseen messages to give them a small INBOX view.

Using dovecot has solved my issues with speed WRT the big inbox.
Seems like everything else comes down to comfortability and doing
what your used to doing. I don't think either method is "silly", any more
than using emacs is "silly" (notepad and nano users are still silly, right
along with exchange :-)
--
Josh I.