Re: Fetching underlying imap mail on M-g

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Bob Newell <bobnewell@bobnewell.net> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>> Some weird psychological thing, I guess -- I like being able to think
>> "now I'm going to check my mail". Plus I'm offline quite a bit.
>
> I can only speak to my own psychology, but I think "offline quite a
> bit" defines the use case in a critical way.
>
> I've never been able to realistically use a dovecot-like
> solution which implies local storage of email because I sync
> environments across something like 8 devices and I'm not
> willing to replicated gigabytes of email on all of them, nor
> do I want to maintain different setups on different devices to
> the extent possible. It would all just get to be too much to
> manage.

I hear this. I have one laptop, one desktop, and one phone. I have the
laptop set to sync everything locally, the desktop set to talk directly
to the remote server (it's never offline, anyway), and the phone uses K9
to read mail, but I have it set to never mark anything as read -- I
treat it as a read-only terminal.

If I had eight devices, this would look very different :)

> On the other hand, I'm offline very seldom, so I'm willing to
> forego the ability to process email while offline, and that's
> a crucial distinction.
>
> As to psychology: I don't want to check email too often, as it
> becomes a great distraction and interruption of a flow
> state. So--- perhaps perversely--- I don't make checking email
> be too easily done. It's entirely manual and entirely within
> Gnus, which means relatively slow IMAP access. This means it's
> just easier to keep writing or editing rather than stop for
> email. Please, no 'you have mail!' jingles. My mode line does
> silently show how many new unread emails I have, but that's
> read from a drop file generated by an external process that
> only runs once an hour.

I have the same instincts, but have not been quite as severe with
myself. I also want checking email to be a very manual, very intentional
act. But sometimes I know that I'll have a reply coming in within
minutes, and this wrapper on "M-g" lets me handle those cases without
feeling like I'm "cheating".

Thanks for your comments!