It has been a couple of weeks since the last drastic change to my email
habits.
Instead of leaving everything on the IMAP servers, I have decided to
pull all of my email down to my local home server running
Ubuntu.
mutt, still the best email client
I am still using mutt
and have published my muttrc for
others to be able to use. One of the things that I have changed is that
instead of using a global Sent folder, email for family/friends/clients gets
saved in the same folder that I save all of thier incoming mails. This makes
using a threading view of the mailbox make sense and also gives me one place
to go to see if I have responded to thier email or taken whatever action
needed to be done. Which should help me actually respond to emails in a
timely manner.
fetchmail
To pull my mail off of the IMAP servers, I am using
fetchmail. The only wish I have for this at
the moment is that it would handle multipe IMAP accounts and the 'idle'
command.
maildrop
To pre-sort my email, I am using
maildrop. In the past I have used
procmail and a perl script using the Mail::Audit
package. Maildrops syntax and ease of were big wins for me this time around.
One of the last things that happens before an email is dropped into an Inbox
(not a mailing list folder), is that I run the message through
lbdb to grab the email addresses, which I
can then query using the 'Q' key inside mutt.
if ( $SIZE < 10000 )
{
cc "|lbdb-fetchaddr"
}
to $MAILDIR
archivemail
I first ran across archivemail when I
was looking for a solution for some of my clients that never emptied thier
Spam or Trash folders, thus going over quota for email. Since then I have
started to use it for archiving mailing lists and deleting old mail out of my
own Spam and Trash folders.
I have 2 cronjobs that run every hour to automatically clean up Trash and
Spam:
@hourly /usr/bin/archivemail -q -d 15 /home/mharlow/Maildir/.Spam
@hourly /usr/bin/archivemail -q -d 15 /home/mharlow/Maildir/.Trash
These delete anything older than 15 days from these two folders.
wrap up
All in all this seems to be working for me, mutt working against a local
Maildir is MUCH faster than going over IMAP. Having my mail presorted again
means that I can have mailing lists locally instead of using gmail for all of
them. I have found that I do not check my gmail account except every couple
of weeks, so while it may be great for archiving lists, it does not work so
well for reading them. This also makes burning a CD backup of my mail easier,
since everything is local.
So, how long until I make another drastic change to the way I handle my email?
Who knows, but when I do, I will probably blog about it. :)