[PATCH] How to improve the mail handling workflow?

[Darren McGuicken]

On Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:35:22 +0100, Matthieu Lemerre <racin at free.fr> wrote:
> I prefer to add tags, for the following reasons:

It sounds like we do much the same things with our mail except that your
approach is quite disciplined and mine quite lazy :-)

>  - 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.

[...]

> 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?"

As it's so quick, I tend to search my entire archive, even for new
messages, through progressive stages of filtering (which is really all
that a saved search is) starting off knowing only vaguely what it is
that I'm looking for.

For instance 'there was something on the notmuch list about printing
format issues recently' would be 's to:notmuch' 'f print' 'f format' etc
until I see what I'm looking for (or something similar) in the results.
That particular set of steps gives me a buffer with 24 threads in it,
the second of which is what I was looking for.  I tend not to even
bother with subject header based searches unless I know for sure that
what I'm looking for had an unusual subject.

It sounds like a lot of work when I write it out long-form, but it's
incredibly intuitive and so far always gets me what I need.

I can see your approach has its own merits though.
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