[Sheflug] mail strategies

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Will" == Will Newton <will [at] misconception.org.uk> writes:

    Will> On a different note altogether, does anyone have any
    Will> reccomendations on how to speed up my email setup? I have a
    Will> few 1000 messages in mbox format (delivered by fetchmail)
    Will> and pine is starting to groan under the weight a little. Is
    Will> there a better format to have my mail in?  (mbox is probably
    Will> the most non-format of all formats)

Use Pine's auto-old-folder facilities to "expire" mail into archives.

Use procmail to presort.  If you want a full local archive of some
mailing list, you can use the copy facility to put one automatically
into an archive (rotated by months, say), another into a current
folder.  Then you can delete from the current folder without fear ;-)

Emacs is probably not your thing if you use Pine now, but Gnus is
excellent for managing tons of mail.  VM isn't bad, under XEmacs.
(It's what I use, with procmail to prefilter.)
With FSF version YMMV; the VM author doesn't support it because of
philosophical differences with rms (ie, rms doesn't worry if a non-FSF
application is made totally useless by non-backward-compatible changes
in the API, and kyle's reaction to suggestions that he assign his code
to the FSF is "over my dead body").  Lots of people like mew.

mh is old technology, but with a good front end (xmh didn't used to
be) can handle lots of mail; it's more oriented to rolling your own,
though.  Easy to do lots of interesting stuff with scripts.

mush and mutt get good reviews; I don't even know what their UI's look
like, though ;-)

qmail can use a unique "maildir" format for delivery; this is pretty
efficient for the MUA too (mh, Gnus, others use something similar).
See the qmail home page on www.qmail.org for pointers to
recommendation on MUAs that work well with qmail.

Hope somethign rings a bell...

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