I’ve been running roughly the same mail system for the past decade, which uses procmail to dump mail into various folders based on rules. It’s server side and now using IMAP, so I don’t need to log in with my desktop / laptop just for filing… things just happen. It’s similar to what Exchange now does, without the annoyances of itty bitty quotas.
One of the downsides is that I don’t get “biffed” when new mail arrives… because every mail reader seems to assume server-side filtering is not going on, they only check the INBOX for new mail. Mine is always empty, as my INBOX is somewhere else. So, I decided to try and fix the problem… essentially renaming my INBOX so that it would point to my “important mail” folder so I’d at least know to look at things when they come up.
What I really wanted to find was a HOWTO to do this… I figure it must have been done before, as now everyone uses /var/spool/mail/userid for mail. Presumably, there’d be an easy setting for UW-IMAPd to do this.
Well… no. I spent a few hours finding partial answers to the problem. I discovered some semi-undocumented features for UW-IMAPd that I thought would do it, but don’t. I discovered the symlink trick (make /var/spool/mail/ a symlink to where you want), but was promptly flummoxed by procmail, which doesn’t like symlinks and kills them. I found documentation on procmail to prevent it from doing that, which didn’t take.
Blah.
Back in ‘95, when I was first doing MetaCrawler, I’d have done the same thing, probably found the same caliber of docs (most of the useful docs I found were via Google Groups ne DejaNews, although man did Google screw up the new UI). And probably ended right back where I am now… about to crack some code.
This has got me thinking a bit… I’m a believer that a list of web pages isn’t what you want when you’re trying to find an answer, but I wonder what is? Again, say a HOWTO to do what I want to do doesn’t exist. What would be the next choice, and how would that be stored for both myself and others to find later?
I’ll post replies in a day or so after thinking on this some more. I’m not convinced it’s similar to Answers such as MSN Search’s Encarta or Yahoo’s Wikipedia (or Google’s poor approximation)… but I’m not quite sure what it is.