Re: useful things with nnselect

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Andrew Cohen <acohen@ust.hk> writes:

> Now that I've finally found a few moments to push the nnselect backend
> to master (with some unfortunate formatting and doc errors along the
> way, and a failure to provide aliases for some obsolete variables and
> functions :() I thought I would write a longer email to this group about
> how I am using it and why it might be right for some of you too.

Glad to see it in!

> I unfortunately have 4 email accounts (3 work and 1 personal) spread out
> on 3 servers, including outlook and gmail (all imap,
> fortunately). Together these accounts have about 100k messages. I also
> use gmane a bit. Handling all of this is not, uh,
> straightforward. Previously I used gnus to sort things into many groups,
> and relied heavily on searching to make things manageable. However this
> still left me with groups that contained tens of thousands of messages,
> and visiting a whole such group is too slow. It ended up being far too
> cumbersome.
>
> I have now switched to a different paradigm. I keep all of my messages
> in a small number of groups. I do very little sorting (none, actually)
> into these groups (for example, all of my gmail is in a single
> group). But I have a large number of virtual nnselect groups for all
> sorts of things. Since these are collecting messages from only a small
> number of sources, they are very, very fast. And its easy to construct
> new ones on the fly. Thread referral makes it easy to look at message
> chains as needed. And since the number of messages in these groups is
> not too large, I can enter the whole group and use limiting and
> group-searching (not nnir-searching) very effectively, and its
> practically instantaneous.
>
> For example, I have groups which contain all messages from certain
> people.  I have groups for the (small number) of mailing lists I
> subscribe to (I used to sort these, but I no longer bother). I have a
> group "Recent" that contains all email from the past 7 days from all 4
> accounts (this is the group I use most often; its kind of like having
> expiration without any actual expiring :)).  I have another group of all
> flagged messages from my work accounts. And so on.

I'd be curious to hear how this differs from nnir -- as far as I know,
these things were mostly already possible with nnir, right?

FWIW, I'm most excited about nnselect as a hacker, as it allows you to
decouple the search process from the servers altogether -- nnir required
all searches to *start* with one or more servers, while nnselect lets
you approach the thing in a more ad-hoc fashion.

One thing I'm noticing now (sorry I didn't see this earlier!) is that
ephemeral search groups don't seem 100% ephemeral: I've searched using
"G G" in the Groups buffer and "G" in the Server buffer, and while the
search groups are no longer visible when I leave them, they seem to be
updating when I hit "g" to update everything later on: I get a bunch of
Messages about re-searching the groups that were part of the earlier
search groups.

Eric