🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <588@ih1ap.UUCP> sja@ih1ap.UUCP (Steve Alesch) writes:
>In article <996@hoptoad.uucp>, tim@hoptoad.UUCP writes:
>> It's been a while since I mentioned this trick I worked up a cuple of years
>> ago, so I thought I'd distribute it again:
>> 
>> The problem is that most of us have mailboxes which have back mail in them,
>> so the login message "You have mail." tells us nothing.  Scanning the
>> mailbox takes too long on login.  What we really want to know is whether
>> mail arrived while we were logged out.
>> 
>
>I assume that you either never read your mail or your read it  but
>keep  everything  in  $MAIL.   If you never read your mail why not
>just set up a cron job to ``rm $MAIL'' once a day. :-)	It's  more
>likely	that you started reading your mail originally, but after a
>few weeks of leaving everything in $MAIL, the pile of mail grew to
>an unmanageable size.	 The mail software (SVR2 mailx or Berkeley
>mail) allows you to save your mail under appropriately  named
>categories, or delete it.  Why not use them?
>
>When you read your mail from the good ole U.S  Postal  Service	do
>you  then  put	it  back in your mailbox?  Or do you throw it away
>(delete it), or categorize it and save it somewhere in	your  home
>paper  file  system?   If  I  were  to	suggest	a clever tool that
>allowed you to determine what new pieces of mail were put in  your
>mailbox by the mailman today, what would you say to me?
>

With the U.S. Postal service, you can usually tell by looking at the
physical envelope something regarding the contents.  Most of the time
you will at least be able to determine the originator of the letter
and have some idea of wether the mail is junk mail or not.  Knowing this,
you then make the decision of when you wish to open the envelope.  This
is roughly equivalent to the checkmail concept.  If the electronic mail
is from an important person, you will probably get to reading it before
mail that comes from a less important source.  Not everybody stops what
they are doing the moment a message arrives just to read it.

>E-mail does require some discipline on your  part.   You  have	to
>read  it  about once a day, delete the junk or informational stuff
>and save the rest somewhere else. I don't think this is such a big
>price  to  pay	considering  the benefits it provides.	After all,
>you've done the same thing with your mailbox in front of your home
>your whole life.
>-- 
>
>Steve Alesch	AT&T
>(312)510-7881, ...!ihnp4!ih1ap!sja

Any system that tries to force an unwanted convention on a person is 
probably doomed to failure.  Just because one user is confortable with
the way a piece of software works does not mean that the rest of the
user community will also be.  Any auxilary tools that can make life
easier for the rest of us should always be welcome.

Tim Kehres
Control Data Corporaton / Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
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