mu4e flagging workflow

[Joseph Graham]

Hi,

I have been using Mutt for years and decided to try mu4e a few days ago. I am having trouble adapting my workflow so wanted to ask what people think.

Every morning and several times a day I like to go through my emails in chronological order, marking them read if no action-points exist on that email, or leaving it unread if it requires further attention.

The problem is that mu4e makes this workflow very difficult. I disabled auto-mark-as-read "mu4e-view-auto-mark-as-read nil" and this works. However when I manually mark a message as read mu4e then moves back to the previous message instead of the next one...

Combining this with the fact that sorting in ascending order does not work properly[1] I am getting the impression that mu4e is hardcoded for people to read mails in reverse-chronological order? Is this true? Or am I missing something? What are other people's workflow?

[1] I get get completely crazy results see https://github.com/djcb/mu/issues/1826

Best,

Joseph

[Norm Tovey-Walsh]

> Every morning and several times a day I like to go through my emails
> in chronological order, marking them read if no action-points exist on
> that email, or leaving it unread if it requires further attention.

My workflow is similar. Rather than using read/unread to flag messages,
I tend to move messages that require no action to an archive folder.
But I just tried it and read/unread works the way I’d expect.

> The problem is that mu4e makes this workflow very difficult. I disabled
> auto-mark-as-read "mu4e-view-auto-mark-as-read nil" and this works. However
> when I manually mark a message as read mu4e then moves back to the previous
> message instead of the next one...

I can’t imagine why things appear to be working “backwards” for you. If
I mark a message as read, I get to the next message, not the previous one.

> Combining this with the fact that sorting in ascending order does not work
> properly[1] I am getting the impression that mu4e is hardcoded for people
> to read mails in reverse-chronological order? Is this true? Or am I missing
> something? What are other people's workflow?

I can’t imagine reading mail in reverse-chronological order. Search does
appear to return messages in reverse chronological order, but that’s
sort of what I’d expect. Usually the most recent messages are the ones I
want to find.

But if I click on the date header to change the sort order (which I
don’t think I’ve ever done before), I get the same seven days messages
in ascending chronological order.

Be seeing you,
norm

--
Norman Tovey-Walsh <n...@nwalsh.com>
https://nwalsh.com/

> Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.--Eric Hoffer

[Victor A. Stoichita]

Hi Dave,

> Every morning and several times a day I like to go through my
> emails in chronological
> order, marking them read if no action-points exist on that
> email, or
> leaving it unread if it requires further attention.

Out of curiosity: why not flag it?
That’s just as easy, with kbd "+" in the headers view executing
(mu4e-headers-mark-for-flag).

Using "unread" to say "needs action" seems just more ambiguous for
no added benefit?

> Combining this with the fact that sorting in ascending order
> does not work
> properly[1]

Maybe try (mu4e-headers-toggle-full-search) in the headers buffer.
It is bound to Q.
By default mu4e only shows the first 500 messages of a search.
Configure mu4e-headers-results-limit to change that.

Regards,
Victor

[Yuri D'Elia]

On Mon, Nov 09 2020, Norm Tovey-Walsh wrote:
> I can’t imagine why things appear to be working “backwards” for you. If
> I mark a message as read, I get to the next message, not the previous one.

In reverse-chrono order, flagging moves to the next line, which is
logically the previous email.

I requested a while ago the possibility to change the direction of the
motion after flagging exactly for this scenarion.

> I can’t imagine reading mail in reverse-chronological order. Search does
> appear to return messages in reverse chronological order, but that’s
> sort of what I’d expect. Usually the most recent messages are the ones I
> want to find.

I went back&forth between the two sort orders, and there are pros and
cons to both. I'm currently using reverse, although it does work kinda
wonky with flagging and in general all actions that move to the next
item in the headers list instead of considering the sorting direction as
well.

But you made me curious, how do you read if you're not "searching"?

[Norm Tovey-Walsh]

Yuri D'Elia <wav...@thregr.org> writes:
> In reverse-chrono order, flagging moves to the next line, which is
> logically the previous email.

Yes, you’re right. I’m not sure what I was thinking. I guess because
threading takes priority over the date order, and messages that aren’t
threaded are basically independent, I just never noticed.

Apologies for the noise. Complete brain cramp on my part.

> But you made me curious, how do you read if you're not "searching"?

The distinction I was making was between “j i” to view the inbox and “s
someterm” to perform an explicit search. But on reflection, I think the
difference is between my ears, not in the software.

Be seeing you,
norm

--
Norman Tovey-Walsh <n...@nwalsh.com>
https://nwalsh.com/

> The world is a vast temple dedicated to Discord.--Voltaire

[Yuri D'Elia]

On Tue, Jul 20 2021, Norm Tovey-Walsh wrote:
> Yes, you’re right. I’m not sure what I was thinking. I guess because
> threading takes priority over the date order, and messages that aren’t
> threaded are basically independent, I just never noticed.

Ironically while I think it's logical that threads have independent
order, and it does work as you *think* it should (because the parent is
always shown as topmost), I got bitten by this sorting exception more
than one time when reading threads where all messages are new.

Speaking in broad terms, I wonder how the UI would feel if instead of
sorting in reverse and have these weird exceptions we simply *reverse*
the result list (just adjusting the threading symbols) before being
displayed. You would get a tree going up.

One thing I don't like when having normal (ascending) chronological
order is that mu4e seems to be really optimized to show you the first
results in the buffer, not the last ones. You'd need to jump to the last
item in the buffer as the first action after searching, for example.
Showing the search limit (query limited to XY entries) would need to be
placed on top to make sense. Nothing major IMHO, but it's a list of many
small things that would need to be adjusted.

So I definitely too feel the weirdness that Joseph is experiencing.

> The distinction I was making was between “j i” to view the inbox and “s
> someterm” to perform an explicit search. But on reflection, I think the
> difference is between my ears, not in the software.

No problem, I have brain farts all the time too :). For a minute I was
really wondering if there was something in mu4e I didn't know yet!