Efficient management of emails

Efficient management of emails

[Shyam Saini]

Hi Everyone,

I have subscribed multiple mailing lists.

My question is  how do kernel developers and other users manage their
emails on daily basis
considering the fact that we receive hundreds of mails everyday.

One way is to tag each mails with their name for example "NetDev".

I'm curious is their any other way?

I would one really appreciate if someone will share their experience
and use case.


Thanks a lot,
Shyam

Efficient management of emails

[Yubin Ruan]

On Mon, Jan 15, 2018 at 06:04:54PM +0530, Shyam Saini wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> I have subscribed multiple mailing lists.
> 
> My question is  how do kernel developers and other users manage their
> emails on daily basis
> considering the fact that we receive hundreds of mails everyday.
> 
> One way is to tag each mails with their name for example "NetDev".
> 
> I'm curious is their any other way?
> 
> I would one really appreciate if someone will share their experience
> and use case.

Gmail allows you to filter emails and place them into corresponding mailbox.
For example, you can filter email by the "list" field and then tag them. For
emails sent to linux-kernel at vger.kernel.org, I tag them with the tag
"linux-kernel", and then Gmail will automatically create a folder (mailbox)
called "linux-kernel" and places all emails from that mailing list there. When
creating filter, you can also choose to remove those emails from INBOX so that
they will not appear in two mailbox. In this way, all mails from all mailing
list get sorted into different mailbox, making things clean.

And then I download them using offlineimap, and use mutt to view them.

        Yubin

Efficient management of emails

[Greg KH]

On Mon, Jan 15, 2018 at 06:04:54PM +0530, Shyam Saini wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> I have subscribed multiple mailing lists.
> 
> My question is  how do kernel developers and other users manage their
> emails on daily basis
> considering the fact that we receive hundreds of mails everyday.
> 
> One way is to tag each mails with their name for example "NetDev".
> 
> I'm curious is their any other way?

There's a zillion other ways, it all depends on your workflow, your
tools, what you want to do with the emails and what you expect to do
with them after you have read them.

So find the workflow that works best for you, the one that works best
for me, probably doesn't work for anyone else :)

Also, please use a good email client, any web-based one will usually not
work at all for any decently active mailing list.

good luck!

greg k-h

Efficient management of emails

[Steve Witt]

On Mon, Jan 15, 2018 at 06:04:54PM +0530, Shyam Saini wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> I have subscribed multiple mailing lists.
> 
> My question is  how do kernel developers and other users manage their
> emails on daily basis
> considering the fact that we receive hundreds of mails everyday.
> 
> One way is to tag each mails with their name for example "NetDev".
> 
> I'm curious is their any other way?
> 
> I would one really appreciate if someone will share their experience
> and use case.
> 

A very common way of handling the email load is to filter one's email
into different mailboxes/directories by subject and use a threaded
mail user agent to organize the email into threads to help a little in
reading the email.

There are a lot of ways to do this, if you use a Linux computer to
receive your email, a mail processing utility such as 'procmail' can
be configured to automatically filter your incoming email into
separate mailboxes. For example, I have a little over 30 directories
that procmail filters incoming mail into. So I pretty much filter
emails from each mailing list that I'm active on into separate
directories, group some into a spam folder, etc. I access my mail via
IMAP so the emails are filtered into directories but it could be into
mbox files. I personally use mutt as my mail user agent (or email
client) but there are many different options on Linux anyway. I find
organizing the email into threads, within a subject directory, helps
one to read the email is a more organized way and allows one to easily
delete groups of related emails that not of interest.

There is a LOT of info about the specifics of doing this and there are
a lot of different options. If you are unfamiliar with this the
biggest problem might be to decide on an approach to use.

Efficient management of emails

[Yubin Ruan]

On Mon, Jan 15, 2018 at 09:41:08PM +0800, Yubin Ruan wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 15, 2018 at 06:04:54PM +0530, Shyam Saini wrote:
> > Hi Everyone,
> > 
> > I have subscribed multiple mailing lists.
> > 
> > My question is  how do kernel developers and other users manage their
> > emails on daily basis
> > considering the fact that we receive hundreds of mails everyday.
> > 
> > One way is to tag each mails with their name for example "NetDev".
> > 
> > I'm curious is their any other way?
> > 
> > I would one really appreciate if someone will share their experience
> > and use case.
> 
> Gmail allows you to filter emails and place them into corresponding mailbox.
> For example, you can filter email by the "list" field and then tag them. For
> emails sent to linux-kernel at vger.kernel.org, I tag them with the tag
> "linux-kernel", and then Gmail will automatically create a folder (mailbox)
> called "linux-kernel" and places all emails from that mailing list there. When
> creating filter, you can also choose to remove those emails from INBOX so that
> they will not appear in two mailbox. In this way, all mails from all mailing
> list get sorted into different mailbox, making things clean.
> 
> And then I download them using offlineimap, and use mutt to view them.

BTW, there is a dedicated doc in the kernel's documentation:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.11/process/email-clients.html

And if you want something easy to use without having to configure/tweak, maybe
you should give Thunderbird a try.

        Yubin

Efficient management of emails

[valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu]

On Mon, 15 Jan 2018 14:49:46 +0100, Greg KH said:

> So find the workflow that works best for you, the one that works best
> for me, probably doesn't work for anyone else :)

Amen. I'm probably the only person who manages linux-kernel mail
with fetchmail/procmail/exmh. ;)
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