remind-me-later: resend email at some future date

I leave messages in my inbox as a way of reminding myself to do
something later, but this has a couple drawbacks: my email client
only lists 40 messages at once, so anything older than that scrolls
off my screen and is unlikely to get attention ever again, and
after doing this for the last decade or so my inbox has built up
to 6125 messages totalling 140 MB.

A while ago I heard of something that sounds useful: software
to bring a message to your attention again at some future date.
Getting Things Done calls this a "tickler file" [1]; there are
implementations available for email clients including Outlook [2]
and Gmail [3], and even a custom service called FutureMail [4].

I wrote a short shell script called remind-me-later [5] to
accomplish the same with Mutt: I just type "|rml" or
"|rml jan 25" when viewing a message to cause it to reappear
at the date/time specified. (defaults to 5am tomorrow)

I don't have much experience using it yet so it remains to be
seen how much impact it will have on my email habits.

A few implementation details: it keeps each message in a separate
file in ~/mail/later/ with a timestamp indicating its due date;
to process the queue it just looks for any files in that directory
with a date/time in the past.

The queue processing is done by a separate cron job that I run
every 5 mins:

    */5 * * * * www/people/gerald/2009/01/remind-me-later process-queue

(it just marks messages as 'new' and appends them to my inbox)

The date formats accepted are the same as those accepted by touch(1)
which seems pretty permissive. (you can use '5am', 'next week',
'2 months', '1 week tues', '2009-01-31', etc)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickler_file
[2] http://www.trenholm.co.uk/?p=59
[3] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7676
[4] http://futuremail.bensinclair.com/home/index/
[5] http://impressive.net/people/gerald/2009/01/remind-me-later

-- 
Gerald Oskoboiny <gerald@impressive.net>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/

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