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

[Dan Mahoney]

> On Sep 13, 2023, at 8:36 PM, Xavier Maillard <x at maillard.im> wrote:

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> On Wed, 13 Sep 2023, Lucio Chiappetti wrote:

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>> Also, being an astrophysicist I tend to work for long term (after all the standard astronomical data format, FITS, was initiated in 1979 and is kicking and alive ... it aroused the interest of the Vatican Library to store ditized manuscripts :-) and they thunk for eternity :-))

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> Yeah, my domain is quite diffrerent ( security/safety of people and property). Storage is an exception and meets strict rules/processes. Hence my distrust for my own personal mail.


This isn’t about “alpine’s” inbox zero, but about filtering in general, I hope it’s useful.

So, my goal isn’t necessarily to have my inbox *empty* but *unread*.  I want the “unread” count to be “things that are relevant”.  Because most mail clients index the inbox more heavily than other boxes, I keep about six months to a year of mail in my inbox.  I use alpine to periodically select a date range and save things off to a folder outside of IMAP’s reach.

On the inbound side, this means a lot of procmail rules for dumb stuff like receipts, periodic statements, and the like.  In my own domain, each sender gets a unique address, which saves me time figuring out sender patterns (and also who sold/leaked/breached my info).

Most mailing lists get sorted into their own folders, but a few special low-volume ones, including this one, do not.  (I’ve found searching some archives to be a bear, and for some, where I ask a question or two a year, it’s easier to stay subscribed and filter off the content).

If JoAnn fabric sends me regular coupons, I want them in a folder I can open and check when I’m in store, but I don’t want to have to mark them as read every time.

As another example, things like Facebook notifications go into their own “social” folder, but I still want to get them because I don’t trust the platform to display them to me with accurate timing information.  (Think of them like the RSS feed that Facebook no longer has).  When I sometimes do not want to log on that site because I’m taking a break for my own sanity, being able to see the notes but stay off-platform is useful.

Alpine is key in this whole process because it’s selection and management tools are more precise than that of most other mailers.  Being able to select an exact date range, PLUS a status and move messages to a new folder (while constructing a filtering rule outside of alpine) is the “once every two months” gardening that keeps things sane.

Also, mass-deleting something like “there was a network outage, you got 127 notifications” messages in a precise fashion all at once is way more concise and easy in Alpine.

-Dan