More email customization
My recent email changes are working out well. Yesterday morning I woke up and didn’t read email. That’s because I didn’t have any email!
Well, I did, but procmail had filed it all into mail/incoming/IN-20080103.spool because none of it needed immediate attention. I have set VM up so that it knows to look for an x.spool file if I ask it to visit a file called x. That’s one line of elisp in VM: (setq vm-spool-file-suffixes (list ".spool")).
I like this setup because 1) it keeps my main inbox almost empty, 2) it keeps non-essential emails out of my face, and 3) it puts pressure on me to quickly deal with stuff that collects in the daily file, because I know that if I don’t it’s going to be forgotten.
And how to get to the daily file when I do decide to go look? Yes, another little piece of code:
‘(lambda ()
(interactive)
(vm-visit-folder
(expand-file-name
(concat "~/mail/incoming/IN-"
(format-time-string "%Y%m%d"))))))
which simultaneously defines a function to take me (in VM, in emacs) to today’s file and puts that function on the “i” key in VM. So I just hit a single key and I’m automatically looking at the non-time-critical mail file for the day. I’ll probably write a little function to take me to yesterday’s too.
And yes, I guess this is all highly personalized, but these are things that I do many times a day every day of my life. So I’m happy to streamline them. And all the code is trivial. That’s the most interesting thing. With a tiny bit of code you can do so much and without it you can only do what other programmers thought you might want or need to be able to do.