Re: [Evolution] Re: email tips and tricks ? - [kinda OT]

[guenther <guenther rudersport de>]

> I have had to be absent from my computer and email for a month.  When I
> opened evolution today I had close to 2,000 emails.  I know many of the
> people on this list get that many in a morning, but it is a huge amount
> to me.  
>
> Perhaps some of you heavy users could take a few moments to give me and
> other SOHO users some tips and describe the tricks you use to get
> through a large amount of mail (using evo of course).
>
> I have spent 30 to 45 minutes vetting just my personal emails and
> commercial spam.  At that rate it is going to take me 8 hours to go
> through everything else.

Install SpamAssassin and use the Evo built-in Junk UI to deal with your
SPAM, rather than doing it manually only.

But you might be using it already. Otherwise you would have got less
than 300 SPAMs in a whole month, judging from the numbers mentioned.
This would make me *very* jealous.... ;-)


> Most of the 1,700 email that is left is from mailing lists.
> I have set up vFolders and filters for each of these lists and have set
> them to thread mode.

FWIW, processing the remaining 1700 mails in 8 hours is an average of 17
seconds per mail -- if you're really going to read any single mail, this
doesn't seem bad. ;-)


> I have been flagging my mail as read/unread, keeping it for a few weeks
> or so in its vFolder and then archiving those I want to keep.
>
> Is there a way to flag just the parent email and have all child mail
> automatically flagged as well.  Same with 'mark for follow up' or
> 'labeling'.  Do I have to create a script bound to an accelerator key to
> do this?  If so how do I get started?  Do I use a BASH script?

Depends on what you're using it for. If you want every mail in that
thread to have that flag or status, Edit / Select Thread (Ctrl-H) might
speed it up.

If this flagging will be used to filter those mails using vFolders or a
Search, it is sufficient to flag one mail per thread -- and using the
"Include threads" feature of vFolders and Searches.


> Can I start with all the thread trees in the message list closed so that
> I can only see and work with the parent?

Unfortunately no.


> Or, are there any other suggestions or better ways of doing the vetting
> quickly?

Again, depends on your use case, interests and the contents of the
folder. Searches can speed up things. I regularly use it to spot all
mails with a particular keyword in the subject, glance over the
resulting list of subjects and delete all of em -- cause I know I don't
care anyway.

HTH

...guenther


-- 
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main(){ char h,m=h=*t++,*x=t+2*h,c,i,l=*x,s=0; for (i=0;i<l;i++){ i%8? c<<=1:
(c=*++x); c&128 && (s+=h); if (!(h>>=1)||!t[s+h]){ putchar(t[s]);h=m;s=0; }}}