Dealing with mailing lists on gmail: * u m and saved searches
In the spirit of eating our own dogfood, I’m learning to use gmail for heavy handling of mailing lists. It isn’t as automateable as mutt or wanderlust, but if you dig around it has some neat features.
One of them is keyboard shortcuts. Once activated in the Settings screen, press ‘?’ to see a short help. Some shortcuts worth learning are ‘y’ (“take this thread out of my face”) and ‘m’ (mute, or “take this thread out of my face and keep it there forever, unless someone actually messages me personally”). Mute is absolutely the most important command evar and you should learn it now.
- FUN FACT: mute was internally called “murder” by Googlers. Totally true!
Here’s my algorithm for early morning mail reading:
- Find all interesting mail and read it. Labels help here, as does the little arrows from the “Show indicators” option (they identify which mail is sent directly to you).
- Do “* u” to select all remaining unread threads.
- Do “m” to mass murder them.
This magic incantation, “* u m”, has saved me from much information overload.
[From my Google blog, 2008-01-18]
New: Gmail labs now finally offer saved searches! They’re kind of hidden in the “quick links” feature, but with this gmail is finally usable enough for me to not miss mutt.
Here are a few saved searches I use often with the above “* u m” technique:
in:inbox is:unread (to:me OR cc:me): the same stuff from “show indicators”. Easier than visually scanning for the little arrows, like people commented in this post.in:inbox is:unread (label:ML1 OR label:ML2 OR …), where ML1–N are mailing lists I’m not very interested in: Mailing lists I don’t care about go straight to archive, but there are those I kind of care but not too much. I want to see them in the unread mail count, but they pollute the inbox too much. I call this search “mass murder targets”; it isolates messages I’m very likely to mass murder.in:inbox is:unread: The plain version is useful if you like to keep important read messages in inbox. Sometimes unread messages get lost in the past.
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“1. Find all interesting mail and read it. Labels help here, as does the little arrows from the “Show indicators” option (they identify which mail is sent directly to you).”
Somehow I feel that scanning visually for the little arrows is wrong. The system should show those messages in another place, so I don’t need to scan visually the messages (and possibly missing some of them).
Scanning visually for subjects that I find interesting is acceptable, because I don’t mind missing some information. But I don’t want to miss even a single message that was addressed directly to me.
Comment by Eduardo Habkost — 2008-02-20 15:53:49
You could do a search like “(to:me OR cc:me OR bcc:me) AND label:unread” or something.
I agree it would be nice if this search had special support on the UI, like the “starred” and “sent” labels do. Or we could solve the general problem if we supported saved searches. For now I’ve heard you can use a Greasemonkey script to create persistent searches.
Comment by leoboiko — 2008-02-20 16:02:57
I think a filter that sends “(to:me OR cc:me OR bcc:me)” to my Inbox would be enough.
Probably there are dozens of ways of solving my problem on Gmail, my point was just saying that your way of reading e-mail is wrong. 8)
Comment by Eduardo Habkost — 2008-02-20 16:30:04
If the Inbox only contained direct messages, I’d have to use All Mail to read mailing lists. I prefer to keep All Mail for stuff I don’t want to read, like murdered threads.
Comment by leoboiko — 2008-02-20 16:36:20
Somehow these shortcuts don’t work for me. Must be Epiphany’s fault.
Comment by Leandro GFC DUTRA — 2008-04-22 10:35:22
Did you turn them on on Settings?
Comment by leoboiko — 2008-04-22 11:18:42