How I Handle Email
The mailing lists associated with the BlueOxenCollaboratory have lately received a lot of mail. Participants have complained about the volume and their inability to cope in a productive fashion. This prompted JackPark to describe how he filters his mail. Others, including me, followed up with their own strategies. What follows is a revision of what I posted to the mailing list.
I’m posting this to the blog because I’m sick of people whining about email volume when it is clear they’ve made no investment in managing their email. While it may be true they shouldn’t have to, the flip side of that argument is that I feel like I shouldn’t have to clean my house, but I do it anyway because I want to live there.
My strategies for dealing with email are dependent on a luxury of resources. I have a fast connection, my own mail server and (for the most part) the skills to manage it. Someday I may distill my thoughts on why I think everyone should be in charge of their own presence on the internet and why it should not be mobile (the interfaces should be).
I like to think of myself as an email handling expert. I don’t know if this is warranted or not, but as a former sysadmin I used to handle upwards of 10,000 messages a day in some form or other, most of it automatically, while still handling several hundred to my face, per day, and generating about 2000 outgoing messages per month.
I don’t do that sort of thing anymore, so the quantity of email is way down, but the skills learned then make life better now.
First off, information handling is not an arena where the poor craftsperson may blame their tools and be scorned. Most, if not all, email clients suck. Some just suck less than others. Many are good for email browsing (I generally use Apple Mail for casual browsing these days), few are good for email processing (replying, deleting, searching, filtering, moving). I’ve yet to meet a GUI mail client that is good for email processing.
My environment:
An IMAP server with essentially unlimited space (I can add disk if I want to) shell access on that server where I can maintain procmail, Spam::Assassin and filters of my own design.
Pine, on multiple machines, accessing a remote configuration (over IMAP) (including addressbook) stored on the server, configured to allow URLs to open in my browser, and images and other attachments to open in the correct application.
Pine provides a feature that allows you to have multiple INBOXes. This is different from having multiple folders to which mail is delivered. In the latter, I have to remember, think about and act upon selecting these special folders. In the former, when I get to the end of one INBOX, I may, at my option, continue to the next one with a single keypress.
Incoming mail is filtered at many stages before it sees me:
Every message is copied and stored in a backup folder for that day. I keep 4 days of backups.
Spam::Assassin scores the original message as spam. If the score is high, the message is deleted. If the score is middlin’ the message is stored in a trash folder (which is an INBOX, because I’m curious about spam, it entertains me and gives me an eye on the zeitgeist).
Automated messages to root and other service accounts are filtered to an INBOX for such things.
Email to lists in which I participate are filtered to INBOXes associated with that group. Some busy lists, associated with groups in which I do not have immediate cares or responsibilities, are not filtered to an INBOX, but rather a standard folder, so they are not in my face all the time.
Anything left after all this is sorted as follows:
- It is checked against a personal blacklist filter and trashed if it is from an address in that blacklist. (predates spam assassin and still catches some other things)
- If it is not addressed to me (I’m identified by one of several email addresses) it goes to an INBOX called filtered
- It is checked against a personal “do I know you” filter. If I know you, the mail goes to my primary INBOX (the first in the list of INBOXes). If I don’t know you, the message goes into my secondary INBOX.
My process of reading email is designed to avoid gaffes such as providing an answer to an email that has already been answered or that landed in a different INBOX for some reason.
Rules for reading email
Read everything (all INBOXes) before responding to anything, deleting irrelevant or redundant messages as possible. If I delete something incorrectly I always have the backup and any mailing list that isn’t broken has an archive (this should be emblazoned on high somewhere).
Check for new mail in all INBOXes again, still, before responding. This is easy to do because I can simply hit
and that will take me to the next new message in any INBOX. Respond or otherwise process stuff in my primary INBOX. This assumes that if it is in there it is from somebody I think is special in some form and the message needs primary care.
Check for new mail (press tab).
Go to the INBOXes associated with work or projects and process stuff there. This assumes that any work or project related email should go to a group mailing list, or to put it more brashly: any work or project team without a group mailing list (that is archived) does not exist, is fundamentally broken.
press tab (all day long)
For those few folders which receive new mail but are not INBOXes, visit them as time allows, read everything (or at least skim for relevancy), delete as much as possible. What’s left is stuff worth dealing with. Deal with it. Delete once dealt with: there’s an archive out there somewhere. If not, and it’s important, refile.
Any folder that has incoming mail that has more than 20 messages in it is a problem that needs to be dealt with, soon.
I have pine configured to use roles. That means that I can have it automatically use the blueoxen.org address when I respond to mail to a blueoxen list. Or indiana.edu for work stuff. I get different sigs and other fun things like that.
I use vi as my editor, rather than the built in pico. This is because pico sucks most of all. I use vi because I am faster with it than I am with emacs.
I’m, these days, generally using Pine in an xterm under X11 on Panther. Sometimes I’m using Pine directly on the mail server through an ssh client. Those times that I use Apple Mail are generally in the morning when I’m feeling a little blearly and I have no intention of responding to anything, I just want to see what’s there. If I discover something to which I need to respond, I quit Mail and start Pine so I can be back in the fast realm of the keyboard. The mouse is handicap unless you also happen to have a chording keyboard (thought about it, too much money).
What do you do?