for Beartooth and others about incoming-archive-folders
NM Public
incoming-archive-folders: Why do you use them? Now that
IMAP-accessible disk space is virtually free and unlimited, e.g.,
Beartooth has NO limit on the amount of disk space he can use on
titan and I have 10 Gigabytes (10,240,000 MB) of space on my
Verio Signature account. The DreamHost lowest level account gives
20 Gigabytes. Etc. etc. etc.
In addition to infinite IMAP-accessible disk space at lots of
IMAP service providers, Pine makes it easy to zoom in on RECENT
or UNSEEN messages in a mailbox.
Because of these reasons, I do not understand why people use
Pine's incoming-archive-folders. It seems like a feature that
made sense back in the days when IMAP providers gave 10 MB of
space and before Pine supported virtual mailboxes (i.e., saved
searches), but nowadays, I think it's better not to use them.
Please let me know your thoughts about this!
Thanks,
Nancy
--
Nancy McGough
Infinite Ink: <http://www.ii.com/>
Bookmarks & Blog: <http://deflexion.com/>
Beartooth
> I have a question for Beartooth and anyone else who uses
> incoming-archive-folders: Why do you use them? Now that
> IMAP-accessible disk space is virtually free and unlimited, e.g.,
> Beartooth has NO limit on the amount of disk space he can use on
> titan and I have 10 Gigabytes (10,240,000 MB) of space on my
> Verio Signature account. The DreamHost lowest level account gives
> 20 Gigabytes. Etc. etc. etc.
Well, in my case, I often keep things in an incoming folder for a long
time, trying to get around to dealing with them, or filing them, or the
like. In effect, the incoming folders are holding pens.
My INBOX, for instance, according to the tab key, currently has
[1279 total messages, 3 of them recent], with the oldest (marked new after
reading once) going back to March 2002.
As for my novalug folder, some of its five thousand-odd messages (ten
recent) need only filing; but many more are things I've read at most once,
and couldn't follow, but may yet need. E.g., the last time I was
considering changing from Fedora, I kept long threads on Whitebox, Centos,
and a couple others; I have others on resizing partitiions; disposing
of batteries; and so on.
Similarly, items I read (and don't re-mark New nor delete) go by
default into a folder labeled Apending ("pending," with the initial A to
get it higher in the alphabet), which gets moved monthly the same way as
my sent-mail.
From time to time I go through the sent-mail and Apending folders,
arranging them first by size, and then by other methods, looking for stuff
to delete. I plan to start doing the same with the new archived folders: I
know there's much there that I may yet want, but nothing urgent.
Nutshell : not on account of anything to do with quantity, but as a
convenience suitable to the way I work.
> In addition to infinite IMAP-accessible disk space at lots of
> IMAP service providers, Pine makes it easy to zoom in on RECENT
> or UNSEEN messages in a mailbox.
Indeed, and that's one of the many reasons I do my best to run no other
mailer as much of the time as possible.
But with a memory that's apt to be fuzzy about things I know I've seen
some time back, I need other methods also.
For one thing, I have no sense of time. I've taught myself to think in
seconds or decades, but nothing between successfully; and I never know
when I am, much less when or from whom or under what subject line I read
about KVM switches, or KDE, or ssh ...
Yet occasions do arrive when I can go through large numbers of messages,
filing them in better places -- *after* I understand enough to create a
folder to reflect not only the topic, but the way I'm likely to remember
or reconstruct my way to find it.
> Because of these reasons, I do not understand why people use
> Pine's incoming-archive-folders. It seems like a feature that
> made sense back in the days when IMAP providers gave 10 MB of
> space and before Pine supported virtual mailboxes (i.e., saved
> searches), but nowadays, I think it's better not to use them.
>
> Please let me know your thoughts about this!
As you see, my way is not the one initially envisioned (if I understand
that aright), but highly idiosyncratic, tailored to what I know of the way
my mind works.
I have folders labelled vdq (and vdqs; I should merge them) into which I
put threads I originate labelled Very Dumb Question; bburg (as the town I
live in is called in its usenet groups; tech (because the "Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and <whatthehelleverelse>," which is here, is called
"Tech" locally); bbd for broadband; and so on.
I have to know both an arrangement of topics and a *short* mnemonic name
before I can create the necessary folders to take stuff out of the
Apending and sent-mail folders; meanwhile, those keep them in chunks small
enough to deal with from time to time.
Incidentally, I also treat Opera as my main browser (among seven or
eight), just because it will let me create nests of folders *and*
*arrange* them in any sequence I want. So I try to bookmark every URL on
it, and then export its bookmark files to all others -- even URLs that
Opera can't display. I wish pine would let me arrange folders in any
arbitrary way, instead of making me invent obnoxious neologisms like
"Apending"
I hope all that is some answer. I don't claim my usage is good; only that
everything else I've tried was worse.
--
Beartooth Staffwright, Wordcrafty Squirreler
FC5; Pine 4.64, Pan 0.14.2.91; Privoxy 3.0.3; CXO 5.0.1
Dillo 0.8.5, Opera 8.54, Firefox 1.5, Galeon 2.0.1
Remember I have little idea what I am talking about.