Post by Daan van RossumDear mutt users, I use two separate mailboxes for received and sent
emails, called "mbox" and "sent" respectively. When reading old
threads I sometimes wish I had sent and received mail in one and the
same mbox. I know it is easy to merge sent and mbox in mutt. But I
wonder what the disadvantages are.
Indeed, splitting outgoing and incoming messages prevents presentation of
the whole thread, so only has disadvantages, AFAICT.
However, throwing all email into one enormous porridge vat is also
disadvantageous, as hunting up and down for the highest priority mail to
deal with next is inefficient.
The method I've settled on is to have an inbox for each mailing list I'm
on, one for family, and the default inbox for the rest. Of the 199 mails
which arrived yesterday, only a dozen or so were unclassified, and the
rest were sorted by procmail.
Placing +/family_u /var/spool/mail/erik first on the first "mailboxes"
line in .muttrc gives them priority when changing mailbox with the 'c'
command.
An fcc-save-hook defaults email saving to "family" from "family_u",
although they could be left in situ. But mailing lists are another
matter. After deleting a large proportion of posts, I find it useful to
sort the informative posts according to subject. For the LinuxCNC list,
I have 454 subject-specific mailboxes, reducing the number of posts to
be searched on a specific topic from 22792 to just dozens or a few
hundred at most.
Erik