MAP@LCS.MIT.EDU (Michael A. Patton) (12/27/89)
Date: Fri, 22 Dec 89 12:38:38 EST From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) Rather than being blasted (as most of us are) with "You have 34 new messages" every morning [...] You are right Barry, classification is very useful. I do a certain amount of classification using standard tools right now and find that I can deal with a lot more mail that way. I wish there were a few more better tools, but most would require extensions to mail and wide-spread support on originating machines. I have thought about implementing some of the ones that are completely recipient side. My general technique is to group incoming mail into about 10 categories, I can read each grouping with a slightly different mind-set. For example, the mailbox for action requests is dealt with first and carefully, but the mailbox for unimportant "general info only" mail can be scanned with only the headers (in fact when I've been away for a while, I sometimes delete indiscriminantly). Here's a (somewhat made up, since I've already read my mail today :-) version of what I see on a typical morning: There are 5 Local messages. There are 73 Misc messages. There are 3 Digest messages. There is one Kermit message. There are 15 Micro messages. There is one MITAUG message. There is one Amiga message. There are Heath People Request messages. (and yes, I'm thinking of subdividing "Misc" :-). Just for those of you who might be interested in following a similar option, here's what I do. For most systems, this either requires that you have privileges or a sympathetic system manager. Each mailing list I subscribe to is delivering mail to a different address of the form MAP-<listname>-Mail and I have the local aliases file set up to distribute these among various mailboxes (named MAP-<mailbox>, see above). The mail reader I use (now GNUemacs RMAIL, previously ITS/Tops-20 Babyl) allows seperate mail folders with different inboxes for each. This gives me all the flexibility needed for this approach.
cfe+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU ("Craig F. Everhart") (12/29/89)
Here at andrew.cmu.edu we invented the foo+bar@andrew.cmu.edu form of local address, for use in addition to the usual john.doe@andrew.cmu.edu form, to allow simple automatic sorting of incoming mail. Mail to local address ``foo+bar'' is stuck in the mailbox for userid foo, and the ``bar'' tag is retrievable (minimally) by looking at a ``for foo+bar'' clause in a Received: header. An advantage to this form of local address is that recipients who wish to use these alternate in-box forms don't have to be mail administrators; anybody can ask that one of these annotated addresses be added to some address list. Like many other mail readers, we also have a whole Lisp-like language that lets users filter and sort their incoming mail, but that's another story. The delivery system software that implements the foo+bar local address form, as well as the joe.jones form, will all be in the X.V11R4 tape, in the Andrew contribution. Craig