[PATCH] How to improve the mail handling workflow?

[Matthieu Lemerre]

On Fri, 12 Nov 2010 15:39:37 +0000, Darren McGuicken <mailing-notmuch at fernseed.info> wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:23:58 +0100, Matthieu Lemerre <racin at free.fr> wrote:
> > Here is first a patch that copes with this last point. Whenever you
> > want to archive a thread, it finds whether you forgot to add a custom
> > "user" tag to a message, and if so asks you for a tag to add before
> > archiving. That way, I no longer have messages without any tags.
> 
> Hmm, this would be very irritating in my own workflow in which I really
> only use a small number of tags on a fraction of my total mail archive
> to differentiate mail type or content which can't otherwise be
> determined from the indexed plain text of the message (I don't like to
> add a 'notmuch' tag to mail from the list for instance since a saved
> search for mail sent to the list address does exactly the same thing).

I prefer to add tags, for the following reasons:

 - If I want to search through a mailing list, I don't have to remember
   its address. Saved searchs solve the problem only partly, because I
   am not able to make complex queries involving several saved
   searches. This could be solved only by making notmuch aware of saved
   searches.

 - I have some collection of emails that belong to a topic, even if the
   topic does not appear in it. For instance, if I receive mails about a
   project "foo", it can happen that foo is not mentionned in it.

 - I think that adding more informations to mail help find it, even if
   it fills my screen with tag names. Basically, I use tags for several
   different things:
     - to label information 
     - to indicate actions that have to be done (like todo, waiting, done, etc)
     - the other are mail-related tags (inbox, attachment, replied etc).

> I agree that the spacebar does too much if you're just using a search on
> the inbox tag and want something to stay visible even when you've
> quickly spacebar'd through a thread and archived it, but in my case that
> was easily solved by creating a new default saved search called 'todo'
> which collects unread, manually tagged 'todo' and mail matching a number
> of other criteria into one place.  When something has been followed-up
> on, I remove the tag.

But the space bar removes the unread tag, so I do not see how it
helps... By default, hitting the space bar throughout a thread would
remove every tag from the thread, so you keep asking "where was the mail
in my inbox that I have read and I can't find anymore?"
> 
> Colouring threads using notmuch-search-line-faces is also very useful in
> that one-stop 'todo' view.
> 
> Would any of that work for you?  Why are plain text or header searches
> not able to find the mail you're looking for?

Of course, I can change my patch so that its behaviour can be customized
using a variable.

Thanks,
Matthieu