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Re: [O] exported contacts problem


From: Jean Louis
Subject: Re: [O] exported contacts problem
Date: Sat, 3 Aug 2019 10:25:37 +0200
User-agent: Mutt/1.10.1 (2018-07-13)

* Tim Cross <address@hidden> [2019-08-03 00:07]:
> Maybe, but those are unusually high maildir numbers IMO.

For personal purposes surely so.

Imagine when you run a campaign on some online social network, and pay
US $76 and within 23 hours there are 1,300 people in the
database. Then follows up to contact each of them, first
automatically, then following up personally, reviewing their CVs,
calling them and so on.

And then you pay US $1000 for marketing and get another 7000 potential
leads, they go into database, and among them there is US $100,000
generated over several years, and you follow up each of them.

And so the database increases over years.

Any type of contact management be it on paper or in computer shall be
(almost) indefinitely scalable. Organizations could keep their files
before 50 years on paper, in paper files.

> I have approx 8Gb of email messages, but only have a handful of
> maildirs - this is primarily why I prefer mu4e and org as a powerful
> mail workflow.

I have just 4.6 GB.

I have tried my best using mu4e, I cannot see how it is powerful, it
is slow, not efficient comparing to mutt.

mu tools are for indexing and searching emails. But it lacks direct
maildir support.

My setup is such that I am putting conversations for each email
address into their corresponding folder, for example:

~/Maildir/address@hidden
~/Maildir/address@hidden

then it becomes very easy to access such conversation related to one
person. I do use mu tools to index and search emails, but mu4e is not
fast, and is not usable.

mu alone is usable, it can search emails and link it to the folder.

There is `maildir' package, this one is not as nice, but it can
quickly read maildir folders.

So it could be trivial to make mu query from Emacs, to provide links
to certain folder and to use some functions from that package to read
emails in the Maildir folder with indexed found messages.

(require 'maildir)

(defun mu-query-maildir-list (query)
  (interactive "sQuery: ")
  (let* ((maildir "~/Maildir/search")
         (command (format "/usr/local/bin/mu find --clearlinks --format=links 
--linksdir=%s \"%s\"" maildir query)))
    (message (format "Preparing the maildir for query: %s" query))
    (shell-command command)
    (maildir-list maildir)))

The above is replacement for mu4e search of email messages. Not so
complex, but it works.

> I use to use the old model of sorting email into many different folders,
> but it was just too time consuming. My inbox was always large and I
> spent hours each week just sorting and refiling my messages.

I cannot know what made it technically time consuming.

I have such setup that I just press "s" and email is saved into the
folder by its email address. If the email address is
address@hidden it is saved in ~/Maildir/address@hidden

To save email is very quick, probably less than half a second.

I would like to understand how your inbox got larger and larger if you
were saving emails into separate folders. My inbox is just as large as
unread and not handled emails. 

> Now I just have a couple of maildirs for each account - inbox, archived,
> sent, draft and thats it.

If it works for you, it works. But with 8 gigabytes of email, that is
hard to handle.

> For messages I need to track, I create an org-todo with a mu4e link
> and if I need to find an old message, mu search works fine.

That is good to hyperlink from Org to mu4e -- but remember, mu4e is
database based, not maildir based. It indexes maildirs. There will
always be some lag in using mu4e.

If emails are sorted by email address, then you can link to the
person's conversation straight and without any database in the
middle. 

> Mutt is OK, but does not integrate well with emacs.

I would rather say that ansi-term in Emacs is not the best. Mutt
integrates inside ansi-term but resizing windows or face sizes may
give some problems.

> I live in emacs, so I want my mail reader there as well.

I understand as I would like that too.

I think that good solution for efficient email handling in Emacs is to
directly access Maildirs.

Mbox and other type of email archive files or formats are not best and
can get corrupted.

Jean



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