Some email organization tips and tricks

I’d like to share a few tips that were useful to strengthen my personal email organization. Most of what follows is probably not very new nor special, but hey, let’s document it anyway.

Many people have an inbox folder that just grow over time. It’s actually similar to a twitter or RSS feed (except they probably agree that they are supposed to read more of their email “feed”). When I send an email to them, it sometimes happen that they don’t notice it, if the email arrives at a bad time. Of course, as long as they don’t receive too many emails, and there aren’t too many people relying on them, it might just work. But from time to time, it’s super-painful for those interacting with them, when they miss an email and they need to be pinged again. So let’s try not to be like them. :-)

Tip #1: do Inbox Zero (or your own variant of it)

Inbox Zero is an email management methodology inspired from David Allen’s Getting Things Done book. It’s best described in this video. The idea is to turn one’s Inbox into an area that is only temporary storage, where every email will get processed at some point. Processing can mean deleting an email, archiving it, doing the action described in the email (and replying to it), etc. Put differently, it basically means implementing the Getting Things Done workflow on one’s email.

Tip #1.1: archive everything

One of the time-consuming decisions in the original GTD workflow is to decide whether something should be eliminated (deleted) or stored for reference. Given that disk space is quite cheap, it’s much easier to never decide about that, and just archive everything (by duplicating the email to an archive folder when it is received). To retrieve archived emails when needed, I then use notmuch within mutt to easily search through recent (< 2 year) archives. I use archivemail to archive older email in compressed mboxes from time to time, and grepmail to search through those mboxes when needed.

I don’t archive most Debian mailing lists though, as they are easy to fetch from master.d.o with the following script:

#!/bin/sh
rsync -vP master.debian.org:~debian/*/*$1/*$1.${2:-$(date +%Y%m)}* .

Then I can fetch a specific list archive with getlist devel 201502, or a set of archives with e.g. getlist devel 2014, or the current month with e.g. getlist devel. Note that to use grepmail on XZ-compressed archives, you need libmail-mbox-messageparser-perl version 1.5002-3 (only in unstable — I was using a locally-patched version for ages, but finally made a patch last week, which Gregor kindly uploaded).

Tip #1.2: split your inbox

(Yes, this one looks obvious but I’m always surprised at how many people don’t do that.)

Like me, you probably receive various kinds of emails:

  • emails about your day job
  • emails about Debian
  • personal emails
  • mailing lists about your day job
  • mailing lists about Debian
  • etc.

Splitting those into separate folders has several advantages:

  • I can adjust my ‘default action’ based on the folder I am in (e.g. delete after reading for most mailing lists, as it’s archived already)
  • I can adjust my level of focus depending on the folder (I might not want to pay a lot of attention to each and every email from a mailing list I am only remotely interested in; while I should definitely pay attention to each email in my ‘DPL’ folder)
  • When busy, I can skip the less important folders for a few days, and still be responsive to emails sent in my more important folders

I’ve seen some people splitting their inbox into too many folders. There’s not much point in having a per-sender folder organization (unless there’s really a recurring flow of emails from a specific person), as it increases the risk of missing an email.

I use procmail to organize my email into folders. I know that there are several more modern alternatives, but I haven’t looked at them since procmail does the job for me.

Resulting organization

I use one folder for my day-job email, one for my DPL email, one for all other email directed or Cced to me. Then, I have a few folders for automated notifications of stuff. My Debian mailing list folders are auto-managed by procmail’s $MATCH:

:0:
 * ^X-Mailing-List: <.*@lists\.debian\.org>
 * ^X-Mailing-List: <debian-\/[^@]*
 .ml.debian.$MATCH/

Some other mailing lists are in they separate folders, and there’s a catch-all folder for the remaining ones. Ah, and since I use feed2imap, I have folders for the RSS/Atom feeds I follow.

I have two different commands to start mutt. One only shows a restricted number of (important) folders. The other one shows the full list of (non-empty) folders. This is a good trick to avoid spending time reading email when I am supposed to do something more important. :)

As for many people probably, my own organization is loosely based on GTD and Inbox Zero. It sometimes happen that some emails stay in my Inbox for several days or weeks, but I very rarely have more than 20 or 30 emails in one of my main inbox folders. I also do reviews of the whole content of my main inbox folders once or twice a week, to ensure that I did not miss an email that could be acted on quickly.

A last trick is that I have a special folder replies, where procmail copies emails that are replies to a mail I sent, but which do not Cc me. That’s useful to work-around Debian’s “no Cc on reply to mailing list posts” policy.

I receive email using offlineimap (over SSH to my mail server), and send it using nullmailer (through a SSH tunnel). The main advantage of offlineimap over using IMAP directly in mutt is that using IMAP to a remote server feels much more sluggish. Another advantage is that I only need SSH access to get my full email setup to work.

Tip #2: tracking sent emails

Two recurring needs I had was:

  • Get an overview of emails I sent to help me write the day-to-day DPL log
  • Easily see which emails got an answer, or did not (which might mean that they need a ping)

I developed a short script to address that. It scans the content of my ‘Sent’ maildir and my archive maildirs, and, for each email address I use, displays (see example output in README) the list of emails sent with this address (one email per line). It also detects if an email was replied to (“R” column after the date), and abbreviates common parts in email addresses (debian-project@lists.debian.org becomes d-project@l.d.o). It also generates a temporary maildir with symlinks to all emails, so that I can just open the maildir if needed.

2 thoughts on “Some email organization tips and tricks

  1. Caveat: splitting INBOX is not for everyone.

    If I have more than one INBOX plus one IRC client (connects to one IRC network only), I tend to go into cycling through them all *much* more often, which I find distracting.

    (At work, I also have Jabber, but that’s a GUI thing that sits in the edge, so I don’t need to check it. But using IRC+mcabber+pine is already too much.)

  2. never got around procmail and splitting mailboxes myself, specially with mutt. So, now I am perfectly comfortable with the mutt limit command to access any mail. I try to stick to the GTD ideas, so I only have one inbox to recieve them all, obviously an action folder and a waiting-for folder (with doubles as sent-mail folder) and a read folder. Well, I’ve split the archive into several subfolders based on the age of the stored mails (out of fun I use Cognac classification: V.S.O.P. etc.).
    Coming from kmail I tried to deal with mail-folders in mutt for some time, but usually two problems arose – navigating through the folders is extra work and usually I was pondering which folder to use for that specific mail. Same with incoming – in the long run all mails are for me anyway, so I use different email addresses, process them into action/read/archieve and then limit the view with a mutt regex on the specific email address depending on whether I am at work or have free time etc.
    Some mailinglists directly proceed to the archive by means of a server-side sieve-thingy. Occasionally I access the archive, limit the view on the specific mailinglist and catch up.

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