Too much time spent pushing emails around into archive folders. I can't say that I need it all. But I also don't know that I want to throw it all away either. I started going through about 6000 emails and trying to find archive folders to push them into so I could finally have an inbox that wasn't filled which rubbish.

The strategy that I'm trying to apply is to make sure that everything that I could potentially want to keep 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. Some of the categories i ended 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

you get the idea

I'm not expecting to do away with search by putting things in folders like this, instead I'm hoping to group things enough to not worry that when I archive an email, it will be hard to find. 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   |
|             |     |              |    |            |
+-------------+     +--------------+    +------------+