emacsmirror / yesterbox

Count number of inbox messages by day

Yesterbox

The 'Yesterbox' concept refers to reading yesterday's email. I learnt about it from https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/apr/15/how-to-deal-with-email-overload

It currently assumes you use the mu4e mail reader.

Usage

M-x yesterbox.

The yesterbox approach to handling email is to focus on reading/replying to messages sent yesterday (a finite number), rather than trying to keep up with today's email (a moving target). This mode assumes that you use the excellent mu4e mail program, but could be adapted to work with other Emacs mailers. When you call `M-x yesterbox', you will see a new yesterbox buffer containing something like:

Days  Count
   1     19
   2      5
   3      7
 4-6     13
7-10     21

This shows that there are 19 messages in the inbox from yesterday (1 day ago), 5 messages from 2 days ago and so on. The last entry shows that there are 21 messages aged between 7 and 10 days inclusive. If you then wish to see those 19 messages from yesterday, just press RETURN on the corresponding line. The days for which yesterbox will search can be changed by updating the variable `yesterbox-days'. If you wish to see the number of messages from today you can include 0 in that list, but then you might be tempted to work on today's messages...

The program also assumes your primary inbox is called "inbox"; change the variable `yesterbox-inbox' if you use a different name. Setting the variable to "inbox/" (note the final forward slash) will search for the pattern "inbox" and look for emails in multiple accounts. See sje30#1 for details.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Laurent Gatto for testing and feedback.

TODO:

• When quitting the search buffer, maybe return to yesterbox rather
• than the mu main header. Remember window configuration?