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

[jason-alpine-info at shalott.net]

> 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'm not sure that "Inbox Zero" is really a "strategy" that one practices; 
but I always keep my inbox small enough that the whole thing fits within a 
single 80x25 terminal window (i.e., fewer than ~20 messages).

I think that an important part of this is aggressively saving messages to 
get them out of the inbox, while having a justified faith that old 
messages can be found quickly, easily, and reliably when needed.

Long long ago, I used to use multiple folders for saving messages, and 
organized the saved messages based on time or subject matter or sender. 
But nowadays, I find that approach more limiting, less flexible, and 
(paradoxically) less organized than just saving everything into a single 
large saved messages folder.

As far as the alpine-specific things you can do to make this approach work 
well, a) obviously be familiar with alpine's searching/sorting 
capabilities; b) be aware of the extent to which these intersect with the 
particular mail storage you are using (e.g., some IMAP servers may not do 
full-text search over certain headers); and c) to the extent that you can, 
choose a mail storage system that will be extremely fast at the scale you 
need.

The latter may require substantial technical expertise, but it's pretty 
necessary, in my opinion.  If a search by recipient or date takes more 
than a second or two on a mailbox with, say, ~100k messages, then you're 
going to have a bad time.  If you're using an IMAP system that's run by 
somebody else, your only option to get the performance you need may be to 
mirror your saved messages locally (with tools like offlineimap), and then 
search your local mirror rather than the server-side copy.

In a case like this, I would definitely NOT remove the messages from the 
remote side when mirroring, nor allow changes to the local mirror to be 
propagated back to the server.  You don't want to get into the business of 
trying to keep the level of reliability/durability/availability as a 
professional email system on your personal machine.  You want to treat the 
local copy as a cache, that can be destroyed and re-created at any time 
from the authoritative copy on the server.

If it's possible to run alpine directly on the mail servers, accessin the 
mail store directly, rather than through an IMAP daemon, may give better 
performance, or it may give much worse performance -- it varies greatly. 
A third option may be to access the mail store through an IMAP daemon, but 
not over a TCP connection; rather by invoking its backend through alpines 
rsh mechanism.  This is my own personal preference; I use Dovecot for 
IMAP; remote clients connect to the frontend over TCP/TLS (which does 
auth, etc); local clients directly invoke the IMAP backend (skipping all 
auth and network connections), which is much faster.  You can then get the 
benefits of indexing and advanced search capabilities that can be 
configured in Dovecot whether you're using Alpine locally or using any 
other IMAP client remotely.


Hope that helps...  Good luck!


  -Jason