Curing mail madness with Emacs

Whoever said there are no technical solutions to social problems must not have had a powerful enough mail program. Get motivated and organized with some new mail-productivity hacks for the classic Emacs environment.

By Sacha Chua, LinuxWorld.com, 05/16/07

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Introduction

Drowning in e-mail? In this article, you'll pick up a few ideas for:

Dealing with inbox addiction by forcing yourself to do work before you can check mail.

Prioritizing mail based on your importance in the recipient list.

Scoring mail, reading interesting mail first.

Sending personalized semi-automated e-mail to your friends (so that they think you care!).

This article will probably be most useful for intermediate to advanced users who use Gnus for their mail. Gnus is an Emacs mail client. It may even be said that Gnus is the Emacs of mail clients: extremely customizable, but with a learning curve that will drive you insane. I won't even begin to describe how to set up Gnus, for which you'll probably need to spend a day curled up with manuals and tutorials. I should also warn you that I'm on the GNU Emacs 22 prerelease. However, I will share some of the advanced tricks that make it all worth it.

The following hacks are just a few of the ways I've tweaked my Gnus to fit the way I read mail. Even if you use a different mail client, you might pick up a few ideas. Have fun!

 

Dealing with Inbox Addiction

If you want to regain your productivity, the key thing is to limit the number of times you check your mail. There are few things as distracting as the constant notification of your e-mail client. Do not check it all the time, especially if it's only been a minute or two since you last checked.

I have a hard time following my own advice sometimes, so I've added this little hack based on Don Marti's e-mail setup described in "laptop mail part 4." Here's how it works. Use gnus-summary-tick-article-forward (!) to mark messages that need action and gnus-summary-mark-as-read-forward (d) when the message or action is done. The code prevents you from checking mail if the number of ticked messages in your inbox is not less than it was the last time you checked mail; that is, if you haven't marked any of the messages as done. It's a good reminder to pick one of those messages and respond to it. If you really can't work on anything at the moment, you'll be allowed to check mail again after two hours (configurable with sacha/gnus-inbox-time-threshold).

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