I completely agree with the principle of mailbox views. I am researching and
prototyping the use of views with Microsoft Outlook right now - and they
have a lot of promise for managing your 'inbox'.

If you don't mind me asking Karl, what are your most useful 'views'?  By
month/date?  What UI software/technology do you use to set up your smart
mailboxes?

Curtis

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Karl Dubost
Sent: January-13-09 1:46 PM
To: Ian Jacobs
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: remind-me-later: resend email at some future date


Le 13 janv. 2009 � 19:13, Ian Jacobs a �crit :
> Clarification: You are not moving email. You are selecting different  
> folders for
> viewing, one at a time. That is also a form of moving around. I only  
> ever look in my inbox, so I don't have the "UI" moving around.
>
> Have I understood?

hihi not exactly. Summary: I work in dynamic contexts and/or on a  
general view of everything if I need (your inbox).

I use smart mailboxes (dynamic ones). So for example what you call  
your inbox would be my "to:karl@�" smart mailbox, where I can set the  
number of days, weeks or months. Usually I set around 1 month but it  
could be 1 year. The number of unread messages are visible.

My flagged messages smart mailbox has no date limit, so there is the  
oldest to the most recent message and I named it "to read again" aka  
this is to reply.

When I was working at W3C, I had a smart mailbox "from:ij@� to:karl@�"  
which is another contextual view which is a bit more constrained than  
the one above.

The principle is that a message is not in one physical mailbox but can  
belong to multiple virtual mailboxes (or contexts if you prefer). It  
is not duplicate, there is only one physical message put in /2009/01/.  
For example right now, there are 505 messages for January month. Note  
that I could have chosen to put everything under a directory /2009/  
and then moved to next year but not very practical.

The benefit is that I focus on what I really need to do only, and  at  
the same time be subscribed to many mailing lists without necessary  
having to read them.

If I ever need to read a thread where I was not included at the start,  
I can go back to the right mailing list smart mailbox (context) or  
create it if it didn't exist. The search of Apple Mail gives most of  
the time enough power to find something. (There are missing  
features).  Result: I barely used the mail search engine of W3C,  
except if I was not subscribed to the mailing list.


(PS: I have (had) also two different email addresses one for pro and  
one for perso and two entirely different imap accounts for them. This  
for sanity in personal life.)



--
Karl Dubost
Montr�al, QC, Canada