p1k3-wala/pages/July_5_2011

<[Alan]> On the flipside, you could look at this picture and say email won. That new platform that's going to change the way people communicate? Guess what, it still sends all the important stuff via email.

By the way, do you filter mail locally into Maildirs? I try to keep my main inbox free of "backplane" type mail. The cycle for me is usually: subscribe to some new notification source, read it in my inbox for a while until I know what to expect, then add a rule to an Email::Filter script that diverts it into some less-frequently-checked Maildir. The script also has a classifier mode so I can divert past emails, not just incoming ones.

For sure, the volume of backplane mail has been rising for me, but I also think the volume of personal and work mail has also gone up. Okay this is bothering me now...(later, in a nearby shell):

    find inbox/cur/ -type f | \
    xargs stat -c '%Y' | \
    perl -lpe '$_=1900+(localtime($_))[5]' | \
    sort -k1,1n | \
    uniq -c | \
    awk '{ print $2, $1 }'

    2004 830
    2005 674
    2006 438
    2007 658
    2008 3906
    2009 4192
    2010 4992
    2011 5663

And 2011 is only half over.

(Somebody really needs to create "graph your Maildir" a la http://www.graphyourinbox.com/)

Now, it could be that the average size of these emails is decreasing...eg "On my way   Sent from my iPhone" which would support the point you're making here about "real" long-form correspondence breaking down into quantum foam.

I only bring all this up because I think that there *is* more signal, but also that there *is* more noise. There's more everything. Without coping mechanisms (filtering, prioritization), the fate of your inbox is a cloud of sexless hydrogen.

Hell, forget your inbox, atomization is the fate of your brain. You'll end up like that toasted kid at the rave jerking convulsively on a wall of blasted out speakers. Dawn eventually breaks, everyone comes down, and now it's time for a nice quiet talk and some long form prose. Don't worry man, everything's gonna right itself, you're just on the leading edge of sensing the wrong.


<[Brennen]> I'd be smart to do a rolling mirror of the stuff in GMail to local Maildirs. I pull it down into mbox files periodically, but that's about it.

Right now I use GMail filters to label the automatic stuff. The better part of it doesn't hit my main inbox, unless it's the kind of thing that requires immediate action. As usual with manually defined filters on a variable stream, this is a pain-in-the-ass to keep groomed, but it keeps the whole thing usable. Mostly.

At any rate, you've got the gist of my plaint:

:"real" long-form correspondence breaking down into quantum foam.

Despite my wording about "basic acts", I hold no brief for a Platonic ideal of correspondence. Most of the stuff I read belaboring some alleged decay of communication into short-form messaging just makes me twitch. Still, I'm concerned that the quantum of writing - or the distribution of quanta - is leaving less room for the kind of expression I used to find in mail (dead trees or digital). The signal's there in spades, but something important can be awfully hard to find in it. "It's not a party if it happens every night."

This is subjective as hell and I suspect your attitude is the right one. Somebody felt this way about telephones. Hell, somebody probably felt this way when wax tablets went outta style. For every burnout case in a crowd there's some kid having an experience he's going to chase the rest of his life.


<[Alan]> mbox? Booooo...you sir need to get down with the Maildir. I have a fetchmail wrapper called fetch_gmail that does this:

    exec fetchmail -v -k --fastuidl 1 -u "$username" -p POP3 --ssl -m "$HOME/bin/mailfilter" --sslfingerprint "$sslfingerprint" "$@" pop.gmail.com

Without any arguments, it runs once through in foreground. If you do "fetch_gmail -d 15 --limit 0" it polls for new mail every 15s and doesn't skip large messages. 

The mailfilter program is an Email::Filter perl script. It basically does Email::Filter->new( ..., noexit => 1 )->accept( "$ENV{HOME}/Maildir/$folder" ), after applying a bunch of regexes to the From:, To:, Subject: headers to determine $folder.

The only time I actually use Gmail anymore is for a non-trivial search. If I was using a mail client that sucked less than mutt (does that exist yet?) -- one that had fulltext indexing and tagging -- there'd be no reason to at all. The two I've messed in this category are sup and notmuch.

On the death of correspondence, I trust your instincts on this one, but wonder if we're just at a nadir. There are attempts to build the long form back up from the quanta (eg storify.com). Or maybe it's just that the spectrum has broadened, and people who never had the attention span anyway are able to participate at the micro end (and there's a lot more of them). Gourmet vs. fast-food and everything in between?