a Gnus biff (was: Restricting frequency of 'g')

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:41:23 -0700 Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> wrote: 

RA> John SJ Anderson <genehack@genehack.org> writes:
>> jidanni@jidanni.org writes:

>>> Your time-limited and cron-job-style assisted approaches are
>>> artificial.
>> 
>> Yes, but at least for me, the issue isn't that fetching mail takes a
>> long time -- the issue is that I do it far too frequently (the "rat
>> hitting the button to see if a crack pellet comes out" phenomenon). 

RA> Exactly.  The problem that I'm solving is not a software problem.  It's a
RA> brain crutch.  This particular limitation was inspired by reading about
RA> Inbox Zero and realizing the degree to which I constantly check my e-mail,
RA> have great difficulty not immediately processing mail as soon as I see it,
RA> and have great difficulty not replying to mail as soon as I've processed
RA> it, all of which distracts me from getting done the things I actually need
RA> to work on.

I hope my approach is helpful:

1) `g' in Gnus takes a loooong time (everything is fetched) so I only do
it every 1-2 hours, or when I leave for a few minutes.

2) I have an `i' alias that shows me what new messages have arrived
(it's a Perl script that speaks IMAP and Maildir).  It can even display
a particular message by number if I must see it right away.

3) I use M-g on a group if a new message is interesting and it will go
to that group, and I want to do something with that message.

Gnus could use something like (2), a biff command that just peeks in all
the mail sources and generates a quick summary, but you can't do
anything with it.  The command could even show the destination groups
for each message using the split rules.  With IMAP/POP3 and file-based
methods this is all fairly easy.

Ted