I knew I'd saved a copy of a message about Emil somewhere in one of my mail folders, but it's not in the logical place it should be. To find it I bounced out of my e-mail system to the UNIX shell and used grep to search through all the files that mail is stored in to find the name of the place I'd filed it. Then I went back into my mail systems and opened the right folder and forwarded the message off to Bob. It would really be nice if I could have done this in the mail system.
I finally got to the point where the was too much e-mail arriving in my mailbox and I wanted to put all the unimportant stuff in other folders so I could look at it later. It was a difficult to figure out, but I installed procmail and got it to sort the messages based on the mailing list they were sent to. I had to create rules for each mailing list in the procmail config file. Once I figured out how one rule was set up I just copied it and adjusted it for each other mailing list. Then I was confused for a bit because some messages made it through anyway. I finally realized they were CC'd to the list and had to add rules for that case. I also found that sometimes mail sent directly to me and cc'd to one of these mailing lists would get pre-sorted and I wouldn't see it until I looked in the place I'd presorted too (which was sometimes never).
I a freshman EE student at Georgia Tech. I have a ok knowledge and high interest in computers. So I ask around & use the "apropos" command to find newsgroup readers. And I saw that EFF suggests using Pine for e-mail and TIN for News. I read in the Pine man file that it could do news. So I set it up w/ our local news server.
So then I look and search for newsgroups. There are 159 in my .newsrc, some I read everyday, some I just peek into once in a while. Pine and TIN are the only ones that don't bug me about "15 unread messages in *.*.* do you want to read now? (Y/N)". I'm not going to answer that for 159 newsgroups! Pine will display all the messages, read or not. But it does this in the familiar style of it's e-mail menus. But it doesn't appear to allow thread traveling. What I love about it is I can save a letter I'm interested in a mail file. So I handle large amounts of mail with folders like:
Computer projects
film/video production
friends
High School friends
adults
computers
info
If I'll need to see or reply to a e-mail, I leave it in my INBOX.
I use the pine program, and the problem I have with large amounts of mail is when I don't read my mail in a week or so. It gets to be in the hundreds, as I belong to a several mailing lists. The way I do it now is to delete most of the mail by reading only the subject line, and guessing where its from. But, if the INBOX folder can be divided into separate folders for the different mailing lists and one for non-list mail, then I wouldn't delete personal mail by mistake (Actually, I don't know if pine supports such things already. Please let me know if it does :)
About a pine like mailer, etc.The more like a word processor this program is the better I like it. I have been teaching other students how to use Pine and invariably they problems they encounter relate to the differences between the way Pine works and the editing capabilities of Word for instance. Mouse capabilities would be great.
I love e-mail but all the folders for saved messages get really messy. I am forever loosing stuff in the deep dark recesses of the files. A quick view screen would be nice. Titles aren't particularily helpful.
Most people don't explore the finer points of pine. I admit that I am one. So perhaps starting people off with a more enhanced version and then having them UNDO the fancier aspects.
A silly note perhaps but the students I have worked with this semester are always signing up on listserv and then getting tons of mail when a more appropriate thing to do would read it on tin.
Tutorials would be great so I could make them sit in the lab and go through various aspects of learning how to use pine.
You are aware that many students think pine is the Internet!
Hope this helps. If you want some guinea pigs for test stages, I'll volunteer to work a class through it.
We use e-mail on our project extensively to communicate internally with other tam members. The team has grown from 20 to 70 people in 2 years.One growing pain was caused by our use of e-mail not only for items of technical and adminitrative importance, but also for bits of humor and friendly bantering. Not wanting to lose this aspect of our team identity, and not wanting to impact productivity by always wading through mail, we set a policy of adding a :-) to the title of any mail which was of an optional nature to read.
We use mail aliases extensively to send mail only to subteams affected.
We also developed an in-house tool called CrossFire which works like an Internet bulletin board and enables us to carry out electronic conversations about specific topics, both technical an non-technical. The limits long threads on e-mail as well.
I'd have to say that the electronic communications aspect of our team dynamics has been a large part of the success of our team-centered approach.
Okay, here's a story...I've spent a year at IBM UK, which is prolific with email. The stuff is flying about all the time. One side effect of this is that when you get back to your desk after being away for a few weeks you've got tons of mail.
Some of them are important ones, like things to do with your work, but loads of them are out-of-date, "car XYZ 123 you've left your lights on", "the weekly status meeting will be in room F2E, not F3F this week", etc. You've missed the status meeting because you were away so you don't need to know about the change of room when you get back!
What it needs is an "expiry date", so that when you get back from holidays/ vacation you only find relevant mail waiting for you.
One other thing...
The IBM "NOSS" system stores your "sent" mail automatically unless you stop it. That's a good feature. IBMers sometimes prefer talk via NOSS because it keeps a record. The bad feature is that it puts all *your* mail in a "SENT" folder, so it's hard to work out how the conversation ran! You can move your sent mail to another folder but it's extra work.
It'd be better if the system could remember the "thread" of mail, even between maillogs. That'd make it much easier to sort it all out.
I recieve dozens if not hundreds of messages a day and it is a challenge to keep up with the load. Sometimes I miss important mail or I skim it and forget that it's there.I use Pine3.91 on a UNIX platform with Procmail (now version 3.10) to sort mail to folders. This helps but is not enough.
The other problem I have is getting rid of messages. I tend to be a packrat and don't immediately get rid of messages. What would be usefull to me is an "expire" feature that would go through and mark for deletion messages over a certain date with a proviso that I could some how tag messages for preservation.
Other things that I'd like to see are the ability to color tag messages.
Hi there,My my situation is: I use elm on Unix (in Suns, HPs, Decs, PC and Macs). I receive mail from two work teams and from three different mailing lists as well as some personal mail. On average this comes to about 100 messages a day. My main problem is with mailing lists. Because they are not as pressing as other matters, I'd like to be able to read them as newsgroup. (I use tin as a newsreader) as this would also allow threading be subject heading. So when I want to read about a certain topic, it's easy to follow through the conversations. What would also be nice would be simply to single out messages that are posted to single users (i.e. mostly personal mail) from those addressed to several (in my case, work teams and mailing lists) since these generate a different response (both period allocated for writing back and priority of reading).
I have not implemented any of these ideas for lack of time (and also, admittedly, knowledge)
It's me again.
Another thing which I forgot to mention, was that the mailing list which generates the most email (upto 70 a day) has adopted a very very useful yet simple protocol of prefixing its subject heading by three identifying characters, so a typical view is:
D 23 Nov 28 UKM-Schizo (87) Re: discreet subject lines D 24 Nov 28 UKM-Alan J Holmes (62) Apologies! 25 Nov 28 Simon Holland (64) the permanent present.... D 26 Nov 28 Steven Low (32) To:BARGAIN D 27 Nov 28 UKM-Tim Hopkins (36) RC church D 28 Nov 28 ARNADA01@uctvax.uc (33) travelling in south americaI know that I can leave out all the UKM-* subjects (or delete them in this case). Simple and terribly effective.Maybe something like that can also be done "at this end".