[MlMt] Using Rules to trim a Smart mailbox

[Bart Lipman]

I read your earlier discussion of this approach. For me, the need to tie 
the tickle date to the original date of the email made things too 
complicated.

The particular implementation I'm trying to imitate is the one used by 
MailPilot.  It's a pretty problematic mail program in many respects, but 
the "tickler file" approach is great.  With a keyboard shortcut, you 
defer an email to a date of your choosing.  MailPilot then creates an 
IMAP folder named that date (if one did not already exist) and moves the 
email there.  When the date in question arrives, it moves to a special 
"Today" view.  The first part of this is easy to implement (if one gives 
up on the automatic creation of mail folders, at least), but I was 
trying to find a way to achieve the second part.

Thanks!

Bart

On 1 Mar 2015, at 4:00, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:

> On 28 Feb 2015, at 16:40, Bart Lipman wrote:
>
>> This is a bit of a tangent but somewhat related.  Is there any way to 
>> set up a rule that compares the current date to the name of an IMAP 
>> folder?
>
> At least not easily. It would be possible to create a bundle command 
> executed by a rule and this could use the virtual header 
> `#source.path` to get the mailbox name, but I don't think that solves 
> anything because the main issue here is how to trigger the rule 
> itself.
>
>> The idea:  Periodically, I have a slew of emails that I'll need to 
>> deal with at some specific future date.  So I set up several 
>> different IMAP folders, one for each such date, and name them by the 
>> date in question.  If I could create a smart folder that recognizes 
>> that today's date matches the name of the folder and brings those 
>> emails in, that would be very useful.
>
> The feature you are looking for is known under various names. My 
> favorite is [Tickler File](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickler_file). 
> I've written down various notes on how this could be implemented in 
> MailMate, but I haven't decided on anything and I haven't implemented 
> anything.
>
> If you want to do something yourself using IMAP and smart mailboxes 
> then you could make a system of relative dates. For example, create 
> IMAP mailboxes, e.g, named like this:
>
> 	Postponed 1 day
> 	Postponed 1 week
> 	Postponed 1 month
>
> For each of those, create a smart mailbox like this:
>
> 	Mailboxes: Postponed 1 day
> 	Condition: Date is not within 1 day
> 	Rule (no conditions): Move to Inbox
>
> When postponing a message you would use ⌘T to move it to one of the 
> “Postponed” mailboxes.
>
> Caveats:
>
> * When the message is moved back then it is sorted using its old date. 
> If you have a large Inbox then it might be better to move it to a 
> separate action-inbox.
> * The above is assumed to work on the original date of the message. In 
> other words, you cannot easily postpone a non-recent email. There is a 
> virtual “last-viewed-date” date which could work if you never view 
> postponed messages. I guess what you really need is a 
> “last-moved-date”, but that is not available (yet).
> * The IMAP mailboxes allow you to see what is postponed on other 
> devices, but moving back requires MailMate. This is kind of unsolvable 
> without some kind of server support for postponed messages.
>
> -- 
> Benny
> _______________________________________________
> mailmate mailing list
> mailmate at lists.freron.com
> http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freron.com/pipermail/mailmate/attachments/20150301/12bbf110/attachment.html>