Re: Fetching underlying imap mail on M-g

[Bob Newell <bobnewell@bobnewell.net>]

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.

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.

-- 
Bob Newell
Honolulu, Hawai`i

- Via GNU/Linux/Emacs/Gnus/BBDB