Recently, I blogged on my home email setup and in that post, I hinted that my work setup was rather different. I have entirely separate computing devices for work and personal, a setup I strongly recommend. This also lets me “go home” from work even when working from home, I use a different physical machine!
Since I work for IBM I have (at least) two email accounts for work: a Lotus Notes one and a internet standards compliant one. It’s “easy” enough to get the Notes one to forward to the standards compliant one, from which I can just use fetchmail or similar to pull down mail.
I run mail through a rather simple procmail script: it de-mangles some URL mangling that can happen in the current IBM email infrastructure, runs things through SpamAssassin and deliver to a date based Maildir (or one giant pile for spam).
My ~/.procmailrc looks something like this:
LOGFILE=$HOME/mail_log LOGABSTRACT=yes DATE=`date +"%Y%m"` MAILDIR=Maildir/INBOX DEFAULT=$DATE/ :0fw | magic_script_to_unmangle_things :0fw | spamc :0 * ^X-Spam-Status: Yes $HOME/Maildir/junkmail/incoming/
I use tail -f mail_log as a really dumb kind of biff replacement.
Now, what do I read and write mail with? Notmuch! It is the only thing that even comes close to being able to deal with a decent flow of mail. I have a couple of saved searches just to track how much mail I pull in a day/week. Today (on Monday), it says 442 today and 10,403 over the past week.
For the most part, my workflow is kind of INBOX-ZERO like, except that I currently view victory as INBOX 2000. Most mail does go into my INBOX, the notable exceptions are two main mailing lists I’m subscribed to mostly as FYI and to search/find things when needed. Those are the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) and the buildroot mailing list. Why notmuch rather than just searching the web for mailing list archives? Notmuch can return the result of a query in less time it takes light to get to and from the United States in ideal conditions.
For work, I don’t sync my mail anywhere. It’s just on my laptop. Not having it on my phone is a feature. I have a notmuch post-new hook that does some initial tagging of mail, and as such I have this in my ~/.notmuch-config:
[new] tags=new;
My post-new hook looks like this:
#!/bin/bash # immediately archive all messages from "me" notmuch tag -new -- tag:new and from:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com # tag all message from lists notmuch tag +devicetree +list -- tag:new and to:devicetree@vger.kernel.org notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:devicetree and to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com notmuch tag +listinbox +unread +list -new -- tag:new and tag:devicetree and not to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com notmuch tag +linuxppc +list -- tag:new and to:linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org notmuch tag +linuxppc +list -- tag:new and cc:linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:linuxppc notmuch tag +openbmc +list -- tag:new and to:openbmc@lists.ozlabs.org notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:openbmc notmuch tag +lkml +list -- tag:new and to:linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:lkml and to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com notmuch tag +listinbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:lkml and not tag:linuxppc and not to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com notmuch tag +qemuppc +list -- tag:new and to:qemu-ppc@nongnu.org notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:qemuppc and to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com notmuch tag +listinbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:qemuppc and not to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com notmuch tag +qemu +list -- tag:new and to:qemu-devel@nongnu.org notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:qemu and to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com notmuch tag +listinbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:qemu and not to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com notmuch tag +buildroot +list -- tag:new and to:buildroot@buildroot.org notmuch tag +buildroot +list -- tag:new and to:buildroot@busybox.net notmuch tag +buildroot +list -- tag:newa nd to:buildroot@uclibc.org notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:buildroot and to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com notmuch tag +listinbox +unread -new -- tag:new and tag:buildroot and not to:stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com notmuch tag +ibmbugzilla -- tag:new and from:bugzilla@us.ibm.com # finally, retag all "new" messages "inbox" and "unread" notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new -- tag:new
This leaves me with both an inbox and a listinbox. I do not look at the overwhelming majority of mail that hits the listinbox – It’s mostly for following up on individual things. If I started to need to care more about specific topics, I’d probably add something in there for them so I could easily find them.
My notmuch emacs setup has a bunch of saved searches, so my notmuch-hello screen looks something like this:
This gets me a bit of a state-of-the-world-of-email-to-look-at view for the day. I’ll often have meetings first thing in the morning that may reference email I haven’t looked at yet, and this generally lets me quickly find mail related to the problems of the day and start being productive.