My email habits (and you can too.)

[Dan Ritter]

I got into an offlist conversation about what I think of as
normal amounts of email, and what I do to cope. 

If you aren't interested in how I handle large volumes of email,
feel free to delete now...

So. I recently asked why people used the digest-style mailing
lists. If you aren't aware, a digest version is a single email
sent on a regular basis by the list server that contains a table
of contents and then all the email since the last digest was
sent.

Pro: 
	+ reduces number of email messages.
	+ can be archived easily
	+ can be deleted easily
	+ reduces interactivity

Con:
	- harder to respond to an individual message -- your mail
	reader needs to support digests, or else you do a lot
	of cutting, and then need to remember what subject goes
	on.
	- reduces interactivity
	- threads don't cross digests, so it's harder to see
	  related history

What I do:

	. I separate work and home email completely. The work
	addresses only get work email. If I want to subscribe to
	an external mailing list that's relevant to work, I still
	subscribe from home. 

	. Every mailing list I subscribe to gets automatically filtered
	into its own folder. No exceptions.

	. If I give an address to a vendor or organization -- anyone
	except a friend -- I give out dsr-tag-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org, where tag
	is made up on the spot to be something relevant to the vendor or
	organization. If I gave Sears my email address on a credit-card
	application, it would likely be dsr-searscc-mzpnVDyJpH52RRcisshMBw at public.gmane.org I
	filter thse into their own folders, too.

	. I don't have any sort of new email notification --
	there's always new email. Always. People who need my
	attention urgently have phone numbers for me.

	. I don't use external email accounts. I run my own mail
	server. I ssh in and run mutt on the same machine. It's
	much faster than any other method.

	. I have two directory hierarchies: the current set, and
	the archive set. When a folder gets too big to load
	quickly -- about 5-7000 messages, these days, on an
	Athlon XP-3500 with 1 GB RAM -- I find a cutoff point a
	thousand messages back or so and move the old messages
	to the archive directories. 

	. I use the Maildir storage format, which is reliable,
	handles every message in its own file, and doesn't need
	locking. I rdon't use external email accounts. I run my
	own mail server. I ssh in and run mutt on the same
	machine. It's much faster than any other method.

	. I run mairix -- a search utility -- in indexing mode
	every night via a cron job. I can search all of my
	current and archive directories in a few seconds, and
	have the results presented as a virtual Maildir.

I don't claim this is the best method for everyone, but I do
claim it is very efficient.

-dsr-


-- 
http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr/eula.html is hereby incorporated by reference.

You can't defend freedom by getting rid of it.