My
current mailfilter has two
features which increase my day-to-day productivity:
- a "tickler," which is a reminder system inspired by the tickler file
component of David Allen's
Getting Things Done
action management method: I can submit emails and notes to the tickler
along with a timestamp in the future, and the tickler delivers the mail (or
note) to my inbox when the timestamp has passed.
- the ability to delay certain types of mail (e.g. Debian mail is held until
the weekend, while news items and the like are only delivered at night).
My current implementations work alright, but they're brittle and crap. What's
worse is that the two features could be combined and handled by one and the
same tool, but I implemented them differently for now:
The tickler consists of a Maildir, to which I can submit mails, either by
mailing a note to a specific email address (currently broken, thus not
linked from here), or by adding a tickle stamp (
X-Tickle header) to
a message with
this script,
saving it to the local tickler mailbox and asking
offlineimap to shove it to the server.
On this server, the tickler queue is regularly scanned by
a script,
which
resubmits mail
whose timestamp has expired to my mailfilter, where it is treated somewhat
specially as a resubmitted mail.
After almost three months with this setup, I can identify the following
shortcomings:
Since the queue is only processed on the server, I cannot register a mail
with the tickler without going online and synchronising my mail before the
timestamp expires. So if I am on my way to a conference on Monday and tell
the tickler to resubmit a given message on the next day, but I don't connect
before Wednesday, I won't get the mail on Tuesday (because the mail does not
actually reach the tickler until Wednesday, when it's immediately
resubmitted).
I have not found an algorithm that would let me run a queue processor on the
server and my laptop without the two causing mail duplication and
potentially interfering with each other.
I keep all my mail in a single Maildir to make searches easy. Since mail
registered with the tickler is stored in a separate Maildir, I often need to
search two Maildirs if I am looking for a specific message. This is awkward.
The queue processor has to iterate the entire queue, which is fine for
a hundred messages, but it does not scale.
I have not found a way to ask mutt to tickle me about a message I send
without going to the sent messages folder and scheduling the message for
tickling manually. One approach would be record=no and a custom
sendmail script, which would store mail to the store or tickler
Maildirs, depending on whether the X-Tickle header is present, but
I want to avoid a custom sendmail script for reasons unknown. Another
approach might be to set bcc to the appropriate tickle address, but this
would result in duplicate mails, unless I set record=no individually.
When I implemented the delay queue, I knew of these problems and went
a different way: delayed mail is stored in a Maildir and a (msgid, timestamp,
filename) tuple is inserted into an
sqlite3
database on the mail server.
This script
regularly processes the queue.
If I just sent you the chills, at least we have the same taste. There are
numerous problems with this approach, the foremost being that Maildir
filenames are not guaranteed to be constant: mails jump between the
new
and
cur directories, and tags, such as
seen are encoded in the
filename (thus, symlinks also cannot be used). My script now uses an ugly
heuristic, which at least makes it work. I should investigate whether
inodes could be used instead as I think those wouldn't change throughout
the lifetime of a mail, at least while it's not moved between folders.
I initially considered just dumping messages to files and encoding the
timestamp in the files'
mtime, but then I would not be able to access the
queue with
mutt in case I needed to fetch a delayed mail prematurely, or
if I wanted to synchronise the queue with
offlineimap as well.
The past few days, I've been condensing experiences from both approaches and
am working out a new technique to combine both features. In essence, I think
the database/index approach is the best, if I can figure out a way to uniquely
identify mail message files, ideally across folders. Assuming I can use
inodes for that, delayed mail would then be stored into the
delayed
Maildir and an (inode, timestamp) tuple saved into the database. Tickler mail
would be stored along with all other mail in my
store Maildir and would
get a similar entry in the database.
This approach solves some problems and leaves others. Assuming I synchronise
the
store Maildir remotely (which I do), then I can easily fathom making
modifications via IMAP which causes orphan records in the database (if only
IMAP would allow me to store key=value pairs for mails ). Furthermore, I'd
have to submit mails to the tickler by bouncing them to an email address, and
deleting the local copy, unless I want duplicates. If now the mail is somehow
dropped, I've lost mail.
Still unhappy about all of this, still searching for a better implementation,
I'd
appreciate any feedback!
NP:
Luminous Flesh Giants:
Duma I Upadek
Earlier today I stumbled across a recording of a work I had not heard in a few years by the obscure Swiss-German composer Joachim Raff.
The composition is an orchestral transcription of the Chaconne from Bach's Partita in D minor, without doubt the finest work ever written for solo violin. This piece has been transcribed countless times; the source material is clearly a masterpiece, but what makes the movement really attractive is its implicit nature - dispite the violin's limited facilities for counterpoint and polyphony in general, Bach succeeds in alluding to a multitude of voices within the same line. Larry Solomon provides a brief overview of what to look out for.
Raff's transcription thus endeavours to render the implicit explicit; for example, where there is the implication of a held note, it can played for its implied duration. Indeed, Raff believed that Chaconne was in itself a "reduction" from an orchestrated original. Whilst I don't share that literal belief, it is certainly good working model for a transcription.
And what a transcription! I've often thought of the romantic transcriptions such as these to be a guilty pleasures; they clearly violate any sensibilities I have about performing early music. However, what is most surprising (and guilt-relieving) about Raff's effort is the sheer amount of novel material involved. Here is an example starting at bar 216 - I have overlayed Bach's original line with a melody of Raff's own invention:
No, Debian folks, not our former DPL...:-)
My, by far, favourite skipper in the greatest race around the world (alone on a 60-feet boat without assistance), 
Giving up on a position within a free software project when you know you re no longer managing to do an effective job is a wonderfully liberating experience. Now that I have started to talk with Miriam Ruiz about handing over the 
While it looks slick, using the Apple Aluminium keyboard under Linux has some issues I was not aware of when I bought it. I've started to document it 
I'm back (for several days now) from Argentina and DebConf 8 to
Portland. Too long a journey and too short a trip, as always. It was
great to see everybody again as well as to meet a number of new folks
from the local community. Here's hoping that DebConf 8 inspires more
involvement in Debian from Argentina!
It was my first time to this wonderful South American country, which
made it even more melancholy to have to leave after such a short time
and to be making this trip without Patty.
Random observations about Argentina, for posterity:
I’ve been playing with a blacklight here at Debconf, during the keysigning party. (Hey, I’m a geek; what did you expect.) Of course, I cannot resist sharing what I saw:
Or configuring LS COLORS
After successfully 
I recently noticed that a very good way to safely read webcomics in
the bath tub is an old laptop with a big screen (e.g. a IBM ThinkPad
A-series like my 15” A31 which has a nice 1400×1050 resolution),
a water proof keyboard, the screen-alike, keyboard only driven (hence
the name) window manager 
Something I never really mentioned was the purchase of the foldable bike:
a 
But what is new now is that I finally gave in and bought a road bike, once
again off craigslist. My daily commute is about ten miles one-way, which
works out to about 35 to 40 minutes of cycling, plus a few minutes of
locking/un-locking, changing, etc.
I had used my trusted (yet heavier) touring bike with its steel frame a
number of times, but felt that a road bike may make for a faster ride. While
it saves a few minutes, it is not really a time saver as the bike-train-bike
commute also takes around 40 to 50 minutes. That said, riding is simply a
nice way to clear the head before or
after work. I am back on the schedule I tried for a few weeks last summer /
fall: running on Tuesday and Thursday leaves Monday, Wednesday and Friday
for the bike commute. So far, I am 8 for 9 over the last three weeks. On the
downside: one rather wet ride home, and already to minor flats that (luckily)
still allowed riding home. The hardest part is meeting up with some other
riders at 6:00am meaning that I am now getting up at 5:00am whether I am
running or not. But all told a nice way to get some exercise in outside of
running.
Last night I thought of a few gadgets which I’d like to have, and although I’m pretty sure you should be able to get hold of them, I had trouble finding anything that looked quite right:
