Notmuch
Every time I view my inbox, it's a spiralling mess of unread email. It's getting worse all the time. There is just too much time spent manually assigning emails into folders, and to be able to move them out of my inbox I really need a system to organise them. Currently there are about 6000 emails in my inbox and they need to be removed so that there is a clear distinction between what is to be done, and what is in the archive.
The strategy that I'm trying to apply is to make sure that everything that could potentially be kept should end up reasonable folder. Essentially what this means is having broad folders that encapsulate high level categories. Especially when it comes to high volume mail.
The categorise I have come up with are
dev: all github/gitlab/bitbucket/subscribed bugs shopping: all order receipts/bills travel: all plane tickets/accommodation mails personal: all personally addressed mail personal/government: all government department correspondence personal/tax: all tax department correspondence personal/superannuation: all tax department correspondence
So for example all travel related documents end up in the travel folder, this should make it easy to find any travel related information in a pinch.
This will never fully replace search, but by putting them in folders my hope is that there will be no second thought when archiving email. There shouldn't be any concern that something can't be found in the future, sometimes search isn't enough.
So then this begs the question how to work with email in one of these broad categories. This is where notmuch1 comes in, but not it alone.
+-------------+ +--------------+ +------------+ | | | | | | | IMAP |---->| MBSync |--->| MailDir | | | | | | | +-------------+ +--------------+ +------------+
This tool allows fast searching of a local MailDir emails. In the past I have used several tools to accomplish the same thing, the last was Gnus and Dovecot. But being able to use MailDir will make things a bit easier than running a local Dovecot server.