[Alpine-info] Inbox Zero with Alpine, anyone ?

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

On Sun, 10 Sep 2023, Xavier Maillard wrote:


> All is said in the title. Does anyone of you practice the Inbox Zero 

> mail strategy inside Alpine ? If so, what tips can you share or what 

> would be the best settings you use ?

>

> I recently switched back to Slackware and Alpine (instead of Mac and 

> Mail Mac), so far, I'm like a fish in water but still learnign Alpine 

> again :)


Thank you for this email, it's full of nostalgia for me :)

I've not had enough spare time due to work and kids to unpack my 
personal desktop in ~6 years.  On that machine my main dist of choice 
since the 1990s was (technically still is) Slackware.

I've used the work provided debian-like dist for years instead.  However 
I do use alpine every day.

As my backend is gmail's IMAP, I've configured deleting to do an archive 
from inbox.  However I don't tend to delete (archive) anyway, I do a 
form of inbox-zero where I make sure everything is read.

I only have time to go through email a few times in a day, often a long 
sweep in the in the early hours if I've had a long day of meetings and 
then dealing with the kids once I got home.

I'll occasionally leave unread emails for the state of reviewing again 
within a reasonable timescale, but this leads to a slight ramp up of 
anxiety after a number of days, so I'll sweep through and move to a todo 
list or reply when I can find time.

Viewing the remaining new unreads is as simple as ;snG with a ^W^V and a 
few -'s to page up, if there are a lot, but I've left historically old 
emails unread which I constantly ignore.  I get between 50 and 500 
emails a day, but some of those are pre-filtered into other labels 
(folders) where I perform the same actions as the inbox.

I tend to leave the last several tens of thousands of emails in the 
various monitored inboxes (incoming-folders=) so that I can search 
within them.  Otherwise they're lost to me short of opening the gmail 
web UI and using that to look for archived emails.

  HTH,

  - Damion