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* useful things with nnselect
@ 2020-09-08  1:41 Andrew Cohen
  2020-09-09  3:05 ` Eric Abrahamsen
  2020-09-09  6:23 ` Eric S Fraga
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: Andrew Cohen @ 2020-09-08  1:41 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: ding


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.

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.

And I have a "Todo" group---I can add or remove any message with a
keystroke. My normal workflow then is to look at the Recent group, and
as messages come in I deal with some, leave some for later, completely
ignore some, and add some to the Todo group. As I clear tasks I remove
the associated message from the Todo group. And I am constantly
consulting my other virtual groups as I go along.

I will probably add the Todo thing to gnus sometime soon (nnselect makes
it pretty trivial to do). 

I have been working this way for a couple of years now, and its been a
big improvement. It may not work for everyone, but just wanted to share.




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2020-09-11  8:26 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 9+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2020-09-08  1:41 useful things with nnselect Andrew Cohen
2020-09-09  3:05 ` Eric Abrahamsen
2020-09-09  3:26   ` Andrew Cohen
2020-09-09 18:12     ` Eric Abrahamsen
2020-09-09  6:23 ` Eric S Fraga
2020-09-09  6:41   ` Andrew Cohen
2020-09-09 11:31     ` Eric S Fraga
2020-09-11  0:00       ` Andrew Cohen
2020-09-11  8:25         ` Eric S Fraga

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