limiting articles and tagging

limiting articles and tagging

[David Carlton]

I'd like a way to mark certain articles in an nnmail group with a tag
(e.g. articles I want to respond to, articles where I'm waiting for a
specific response), and then to have a way to only see the matching
articles in that group.  (I don't need an open-ended set of tags,
though I wouldn't mind that; having three or four user-defined tags is
all I really need.)

I've been looking at the manual sections on "Marking Articles" and
"Limiting", and it seems like a lot of the underlying functionality is
in place, but I can't quite figure out a way to do exactly what I
want; can somebody offer advice?

Thanks,
David Carlton
carlton@bactrian.org

Re: limiting articles and tagging

[Richard G Riley]

David Carlton <carlton@bactrian.org> writes:

> I'd like a way to mark certain articles in an nnmail group with a tag
> (e.g. articles I want to respond to, articles where I'm waiting for a
> specific response), and then to have a way to only see the matching
> articles in that group.  (I don't need an open-ended set of tags,
> though I wouldn't mind that; having three or four user-defined tags is
> all I really need.)
>
> I've been looking at the manual sections on "Marking Articles" and
> "Limiting", and it seems like a lot of the underlying functionality is
> in place, but I can't quite figure out a way to do exactly what I
> want; can somebody offer advice?


While not exactly what you want, I tend to use org-mode for this - I
simply "remember" the mails/posts I want to respond to and tag
them/schedule them accordingly in org files. Doing the work is then a
single key press away from my agenda/list of things to do (org-mode
stores a link to the gnus article).

If its simply a case of keeping an article visible for a short period I
just mark it with "!".

Re: limiting articles and tagging

[William Xu]

David Carlton <carlton@bactrian.org> writes:

> I'd like a way to mark certain articles in an nnmail group with a tag
> (e.g. articles I want to respond to, 

,----
| `!'
|      Marked as ticked (`gnus-ticked-mark').
| 
|      "Ticked articles" are articles that will remain visible always.  If
|      you see an article that you find interesting, or you want to put
|      off reading it, or replying to it, until sometime later, you'd
|      typically tick it.  However, articles can be expired (from news
|      servers by the news server software, Gnus itself never expires
|      ticked messages), so if you want to keep an article forever,
|      you'll have to make it persistent (*note Persistent Articles::).
`----

> articles where I'm waiting for a specific response),

I would also like to know a better way if any.  At present, I use "!".

> and then to have a way to only see the matching articles in that
> group.

There are lots of gnus-summary-limit-to-* functions, including by
author, date, etc.  

-- 
William

http://williamxu.net9.org

Re: limiting articles and tagging

[Sébastien Vauban]

Hi Richard,

> I simply "remember" the mails/posts I want to respond to and
> tag them/schedule them accordingly in org files. Doing the
> work is then a single key press away from my agenda/list of
> things to do (org-mode stores a link to the gnus article).

Did you automate somehow the process to keep track of the mail
ID, and to store it in your Org file?

Best regards,
  Sebastien

-- 
Sébastien Vauban

Re: limiting articles and tagging

[Charles philip Chan]

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Richard G Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com> writes:

> While not exactly what you want, I tend to use org-mode for this - I
> simply "remember" the mails/posts I want to respond to and tag
> them/schedule them accordingly in org files.

Another approach is to use planner-mode + remember which is what I do.

Charles


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Re: limiting articles and tagging

[Bastien]

William Xu <william.xwl@gmail.com> writes:

> I would also like to know a better way if any.  At present, I use "!".

I use a combination of "!" (ticking) "?" (dormant article) and
association with my org-mode set up.

For mails, I try to stick to the five actions Merlin Mann describes in
his talk "Inbox Zero": 

1. Delete
2. Delegate
3. Respond
4. Defer
5. Do

(I don't delete, I archive.)

I use "!" to defer things I want to keep in sight.  I use "?" to defer
interesting things that I don't want to keep in sight.  I use remember
and Org for things that enters into an Org project and that I need to
plan.

I'd say that the distribution among deferred emails is this:

 ticked: 10%
dormant: 30%
 planed: 60%

And I try to keep the proportion of deferred emails below 50% of all
emails.

As for tagging emails properly, maybe the gnus-registry.el will soon let
you do this with a nice UI.  IIRC Ted is working on this, and I hope it
will be out soon because I would find this very useful!

-- 
Bastien

Re: limiting articles and tagging

[William Xu]

Bastien <bzg@altern.org> writes:

> I use "?" to defer interesting things that I don't want to keep in
> sight.

I find "?" uncomfortable to use: I tried marking some article in some
group, then later, when I wanted to access it again, I had no clue which
group it was ! Thus I ended it up with saving those articles in a
specific group.

> I use remember and Org for things that enters into an Org project and
> that I need to plan.

Hm, maybe Org mode is the better solution here(like remembering mails to
reply, mails waiting for response).  I should try to learn it.

-- 
William

http://williamxu.net9.org

Re: limiting articles and tagging

[Bastien]

William Xu <william.xwl@gmail.com> writes:

> Hm, maybe Org mode is the better solution here(like remembering mails to
> reply, mails waiting for response).  I should try to learn it.

Org will not only be useful to store email-based tasks.  It will also be
useful to store mairix searches, and to let them pop up as tasks in your
agenda.  

For example, you can search for the mails you received from X in the
last month and create a task to process those emails every month.

I find this very powerful and this help me keep a clean inbox.

-- 
Bastien

Re: limiting articles and tagging

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:31:45 +0200, Bastien <bzg@altern.org> wrote:
> William Xu <william.xwl@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Hm, maybe Org mode is the better solution here(like remembering mails to
>> reply, mails waiting for response).  I should try to learn it.
>
> Org will not only be useful to store email-based tasks.  It will also be
> useful to store mairix searches, and to let them pop up as tasks in your
> agenda.

Hi Bastien,

How do you add links to an org-mode file when reading articles?

Re: limiting articles and tagging

[Bastien]

Hi Giorgos,

Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> writes:

> How do you add links to an org-mode file when reading articles?

If you are using a recent version of Org, first make sure the module
org-gnus is loaded at startup:

,----
| M-x customize-variable RET org-modules RET
`----

Then set up remember to work with Org:

,----
| (org-remember-insinuate)
`----

I set org-remember to C-M-r:

,----
| (global-set-key [(control meta r)] 'org-remember)
`----

Then define your templates:

,----
| (setq org-remember-templates 
|       '(("Buffer" ?b "* %a\n\n%i%?%!" "~/org/bzg.org" "Buffer" nil)
| 	("Org" ?o "* %a\n\n%i%?" "~/org/bzg.org" "Org" nil)
| 	("Infos" ?i "* %a\n\n%i%?%!" "~/org/bzg.org" "Infos" nil)))
`----

The %a in each template will be replaced by a link to the Gnus message.
The %! means "immediatly store this note without further prompt", which
is very handy for quick storing of emails.  You can also use the more
complex functionality of remember-templates to store emails in different
places depending on their content...  sigh -- I need to make a tutorial
about this!

In any case, see (info "(org)Remember templates") for details.

HTH,

-- 
Bastien

Re: limiting articles and tagging

[David Carlton]

On Mon, 31 Mar 2008 04:21:03 +0200, Richard G Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com> said:
> David Carlton <carlton@bactrian.org> writes:

>> I'd like a way to mark certain articles in an nnmail group with a tag
>> (e.g. articles I want to respond to, articles where I'm waiting for a
>> specific response), and then to have a way to only see the matching
>> articles in that group.

> While not exactly what you want, I tend to use org-mode for this - I
> simply "remember" the mails/posts I want to respond to and tag
> them/schedule them accordingly in org files. Doing the work is then a
> single key press away from my agenda/list of things to do (org-mode
> stores a link to the gnus article).

Thanks, I'll look into that - that sounds like it might be a good fit
for me, too.

David Carlton
carlton@bactrian.org

Re: limiting articles and tagging

[David Carlton]

On Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:09:56 +0200, Bastien <bzg@altern.org> said:

> William Xu <william.xwl@gmail.com> writes:
>> I would also like to know a better way if any.  At present, I use "!".

> I use a combination of "!" (ticking) "?" (dormant article) and
> association with my org-mode set up.

Huh, didn't know about ?.  I think ! and ? is barely too small for me,
but maybe that will work.  I'll start with org-mode, though, since it
seems to be getting several votes.

David Carlton
carlton@bactrian.org

Re: limiting articles and tagging

[David Carlton]

On Sun, 30 Mar 2008 17:42:39 -0700, David Carlton <carlton@bactrian.org> said:

> I'd like a way to mark certain articles in an nnmail group with a tag
> (e.g. articles I want to respond to, articles where I'm waiting for a
> specific response), and then to have a way to only see the matching
> articles in that group.  (I don't need an open-ended set of tags,
> though I wouldn't mind that; having three or four user-defined tags is
> all I really need.)

Thanks for the responses so far.  I'm still considering org-mode; I
haven't yet given up on an internal-to-gnus solution, though.

I looked at the existing marks; I don't think they'll do the trick,
and unfortunately the marks mechanism doesn't seem like it's
extensible at all.  Browsing through the other gnus-summary-limit
functions, though, "gnus-summary-limit-to-extra" caught my eye.

Just what are the consequences of adding a header to
gnus-extra-headers?  I'm thinking that I could add in another header
there ("X-Tag", say), write some simple commands to edit messages to
add/modify the X-Tag: header in the current article, and write some
wrappers to gnus-summary-limit-to-extra to pick out the articles that
I want.

Does that sound like it should work?  Are there any gotchas I should
know about before I start tinkering with it?  I'm worried that there
might be some index of the extra headers for articles that could cause
problems if I go this route, or something like that.

Also, gnus-summary-limit-to-extra doesn't look that complicated; could
I write a function that does something similar to it but doesn't care
about gnus-extra-headers?  gnus-summary-limit-to-extra calls
gnus-summary-find-matching; when looking through the latter function,
at first I was afraid that it depends on there being a
narrowly-defined set of mail-header-XXX functions, but will
mail-header-extra work with an arbitrary header, will gnus-data-header
return all the headers?

Obviously, I'm not too familiar with the Gnus code base; I'm happy to
do some experimentation, but any tips that people had would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks,
David Carlton
carlton@bactrian.org

Re: limiting articles and tagging

[David Carlton]

On Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:43:14 -0700, David Carlton <carlton@bactrian.org> said:

> On Sun, 30 Mar 2008 17:42:39 -0700, David Carlton <carlton@bactrian.org> said:
>> I'd like a way to mark certain articles in an nnmail group with a tag
>> (e.g. articles I want to respond to, articles where I'm waiting for a
>> specific response), and then to have a way to only see the matching
>> articles in that group.

> I looked at the existing marks; I don't think they'll do the trick,
> and unfortunately the marks mechanism doesn't seem like it's
> extensible at all.  Browsing through the other gnus-summary-limit
> functions, though, "gnus-summary-limit-to-extra" caught my eye.

> Just what are the consequences of adding a header to
> gnus-extra-headers?  I'm thinking that I could add in another header
> there ("X-Tag", say), write some simple commands to edit messages to
> add/modify the X-Tag: header in the current article, and write some
> wrappers to gnus-summary-limit-to-extra to pick out the articles that
> I want.

> Does that sound like it should work?  Are there any gotchas I should
> know about before I start tinkering with it?  I'm worried that there
> might be some index of the extra headers for articles that could cause
> problems if I go this route, or something like that.

> Also, gnus-summary-limit-to-extra doesn't look that complicated; could
> I write a function that does something similar to it but doesn't care
> about gnus-extra-headers?  gnus-summary-limit-to-extra calls
> gnus-summary-find-matching; when looking through the latter function,
> at first I was afraid that it depends on there being a
> narrowly-defined set of mail-header-XXX functions, but will
> mail-header-extra work with an arbitrary header, will gnus-data-header
> return all the headers?

I poked around some more; the bad news is that, no, gnus-data-header
only returns some of the headers (including ones in
gnus-extra-headers), but the good news is that now the code makes a
bit more sense to me, and I'm less worried about some sort of weird
cache being there that I'm not aware of.  So I think I'll try that
route when I have a few spare minutes, unless somebody knows why it's
a bad idea...

David Carlton
carlton@bactrian.org

Re: limiting articles and tagging

[Bastien]

David Carlton <carlton@bactrian.org> writes:

> Just what are the consequences of adding a header to
> gnus-extra-headers?  I'm thinking that I could add in another header
> there ("X-Tag", say), write some simple commands to edit messages to
> add/modify the X-Tag: header in the current article, and write some
> wrappers to gnus-summary-limit-to-extra to pick out the articles that
> I want.
>
> Does that sound like it should work?  

To me, yes.

You can manually edit a mail and insert the X-Tag header.

You can write a function that does it for you quickly.  This is
especially useful if you only use three or four tags.

You can also set such a header via procmail.
See for example this rule:

,----
| :0 fwh
| * B ?? (David Carlton)
| | formail -I "X-found-keyword: David"
`----

Then use `gnus-summary-limit-to-headers' to limit the summary to article
with your X-Tag header matching the right keyword.

-- 
Bastien

Re: limiting articles and tagging

[David]

David Carlton <carlton@bactrian.org> writes:
> Does that sound like it should work?  Are there any gotchas I should
> know about before I start tinkering with it?  I'm worried that there
> might be some index of the extra headers for articles that could cause
> problems if I go this route, or something like that.

I'd say the main gotcha is that this will only work with back ends which
support article editing. AFAIK nnml shouldn't be a problem, but this
won't work e.g. with nnimap. 

Therefore, the more general way would be to use the Gnus registry. As
Bastien already wrote, CVS Gnus has some support for this, but it still
needs work (e.g. there are no gnus-summary-limit commands for registry
marks yet).

-David