[VM] Mainly: How do you use virtual folders every day? and other questions

[Stefan.Gr...@stmail.uni-bayreuth.de]

Hello everyone,

I have been using VM for a couple of months or so now and would like to send you a few lines with questions and some comments. I used Evolution for years but got enerved by problems I had every time I installed a new distribution. Evolution did not recover using the "backup archive" I made before because of version conflicts etc. So I hope to migrate my emails more easily whenever I change to a fresh installation.
Secondly I found myself typing C-p and C-n so often, with lots of new-message- and print-dialogs popping out :) This is why I decided to try out VM. So I am still a beginner, I'd say.

(i) I found a html version of the vm.info document in my /usr/share/doc/vm and found it very useful, especially to get you going, because there are people like me who have never distinguished between spool files and folders before... It explains this quite well I think, in contrast to the VMQuickstart page on the Emacswiki.

Maybe this text would be something that could be included on the vm webpage as well to make this text accessible to more people.

(ii) Now my main question:

Uday Reddy wrote some time ago
(http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/viewmail-info/2012-10/msg00025.html) :
> But I still wanted the subject tags retained in the INBOX
> folders, because the mail comes from a variety of sources and I want to be
> able to quickly eyeball it for important stuff. However, once I have filed
> away the mail in archival folders, I wanted the subject tags to disappear.

My question is: How, in more detail, do you use vm, dealing with lots of email traffic, lists, newsletters and private mails?
For simplicity, let's assume I only have one inbox, say a POP box.
Now I defined some virtual folders which can sort out certain mailing lists or other regularly arriving messages. But physically they remain in the inbox and in this inbox I still have a mixture of private mails and others.
Do you have a certain filter for private mails? Or do you use vm-virtual-auto-archive?
It is this feature that I cannot get working:

I defined `vm-virtual-auto-folder-alist' as follows (there are other virtual folders too)

(setq vm-virtual-folder-alist
'(
("veryold"
(("inbox" "gmail" "stmail")
(older-than 150)
)
)
)
)

(setq vm-virtual-auto-folder-alist
'(
("veryold" . "~/.email/archiv")
)
)

and I can visit these with 'V V'. But when I invoke `M-x vm-virtual-auto-archive-messages' i only get the Messages:

---- *Messages* ----------------
Auto archive the entire folder? (y or n)
Archiving...
No messages were archived
-----*Messages end*---------------




I have several other problems, too:

(iii) I could not make it to define a virtual folder on an IMAP folder. Is there somebody here who does use this feature? (Just to know, wether its me or VM...) Everything I tried produced only empty virtual folders.

(iv) My vm-spool-files list has several elements like this:

("~/.email/stmail" "pop-ssl:mail.host.de:995:pass:my_username:*" "~/.email/stmail.crash")

The issue is: if I insert the password instead of *, then vm does not find any new messages, even if there are several (according to the webinterface of my university). Then if I use * again, it fetches them. This might be a bug?


(v) Then something minor:

>From the Thread "[VM] Beginner VM questions" last September:
> > 3) Can I go from IMAP folder to IMAP folder without leaving a trail of open
> > Summary and Presentation buffers?

> There isn't anything built-in to do that. But it is easy enough to define a
> function for yourself, something along the lines of:

> (defun switch ()
> (interactive)
> (call-interactively 'vm-quit t)
> (call-interactively 'vm-visit-imap-folder t))

Thank you Uday, I use your snippet since. However, something I would find even a bit more useful would be: I would like 'q' (vm-quit) to go to an open folder, if there is one. However my Lisp skills are too bad at the moment to do it myself.


have a nice day

Stefan