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

[Steve Litt]

Xavier Maillard said on Tue, 12 Sep 2023 06:02:27 +0200 (CEST)


>Hello,

>

>On Mon, 11 Sep 2023, Simon Harrison wrote:

>

>> Today, I have a different approach which I find works really well for

>> me: Multiple mailboxes  

>

>I see but what's the purpose of storing mails. 


Yesterday I needed to know how long I'd been doing business with a
specific customer, so I went back in my emails and found the earliest
correspondence with them, which was 2007. Thanks to my saving most
non-spam emails, I can get back in touch with people I haven't spoken
to in years. I'm a member of over 20 Linux User Groups, with each group
having its own folder, so I can look back and see various things. By
storing emails from my friends, I can look back and see what we were
talking about a few months ago. Deleting all my email, or even most of
my email, would completely uproot the way I conduct my business and
personal life.


>I experimented so many 

>approaches. In the end, I just get a whole bunch of 

>mails-I-will-never-look-at-again with possibly sensible data (private 

>informations, invoices, etc.)


The sensitive data is a valid concern. You could always delete just
that info, after storing it somewhere badguys can't get at it. Because
usually those emails have info you'll later find necessary, summarily
deleting it without archive is a bad idea.


>

>I like the idea of multiple account in the first hand but, I do not

>really see the added value.


I do. I have a little over 400 folders in a categorized hierarchy. This
makes it easy to find specific emails.


>> For me, inbox zero achieved nothing. It's housekeeping for no good

>> reason.  

>

>Inbox zero for me is synonym of 1) comfort, 2) less stress, 3) more 

>ecological (what's the point of thousands of messages stored on 

>energy-guzzling servers).


As far as comfort and stress, it would be even more comfortable and
less stressful not to do email at all. As far as ecological, my 70,000+
stored emails fit into 18GB of my 14TB disk on my desktop computer. A
hard disk is the world's most efficient file cabinet. I have no emails
on my ISP's SMTP server because they're deleted from the server upon
download.

I keep all my emails on a Dovecot IMAP server on my desktop computer,
because few or no email clients can successfully store all those files,
and because with my emails on my personal IMAP server I can switch
email clients every time one goes bad, or for troubleshooting. The
message flow goes as follows:

Fetchmail downloads and deletes the email from my ISP's SMTP server,
and passes it on to Procmail for categorization. Procmail uses recipes
to pass each email to the proper maildir folder on my personal Dovecot
IMAP server. My email client is then used as a window into my personal
Dovecot server.


>In 30 years, I can count on the fingers on my two hands the number of 

>times I needed to search/access an archived message, making the whole 

>purpose of storing/archiveing pretty unnecessary.

>

>Inbox zero is for me to regain control of my mailbox with good and

>simple habits.


You and I have very different workflow patterns.

SteveT

Steve Litt 

Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21