[PATCH] How to improve the mail handling workflow?

[Michal Sojka]

On Fri, 12 Nov 2010, Darren McGuicken 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 agree with you in that in many cases tags can be replaced by saved
searches. Last time I did it, i.e. used saved searches to distinguish
messages from different mailing lists, the result was that it took very
long time (something like 5 seconds) to show notmuch-hello screen. There
is a bug in notmuch hello, as I described in
id:"87wrtz3pw2.fsf at steelpick.2x.cz".

Additionally, I compared the speed of command line searches for tags and
for the whole email addresses and even without the bug mentioned above,
the search for to: is usually slower than the search for tag:.

And finally, there are some mailing lists, which changed their address
in the past or have multiple aliases and in this case you always has to
use a more complex search to match all messages to that mailing list and
these searches are even more slow than tag searches.

-Michal