Terry Jones

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:

  (define-key vm-mode-map "i"
    '(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.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.