The gmail way of working is a good model. Mail is received in the inbox, you read it and when you have digested it you press an 'Archive' button to move it from the inbox to the archive directory. I like this, it keeps the inbox clean of everything except email that needs dealing with. The old messages are out of the way, in a place where they can be ignored until 2 years later when you need to prove someone wrong.
I have started working like this on my dovecat IMAP/squirrelmail setup: I deal with stuff in the inbox and move it to one of the following:
- a project related folder
- an archive folder for general stuff.
- a 'spam.categorically' folder
This has another advantage because the archive folder will be full of 'ham' messages (not spam) and makes a good input to the spamassassin bayes filter. Messages in the inbox can go from 'unread' to 'deleted' very quickly, in which case the bayes filter does not get a chance to look at them as it learns on a cron job every night (hoping it will learn the new keyword 'rolex' real soon).
I still need to realise my dream of publishing the contents of the project related folders on a web server where they can be searched, linked to and ideally threaded. This needs some kind of mega mail tool. The closest I can find is mail list server stuff which I am not sure can deal with CC's etc. Mailman may be hackable, being python, but where I've seen it used the presentation is pretty poor, one of the things that puts me off subscribing to mailing lists.
Peter's Moblog
