Policy on folder's name and path's length

[Piotr Auksztulewicz]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2021 at 07:49:38AM +0000, Rupert Gallagher wrote:
> # subfolders, everywhere...

Haha that's me - almost. I have a lot of subfolders, one for each online
business/shop that I ever interacted with (and separate email alias for
each of them!), some of them sorted into subcategories, one for each
person I cared to save emails from/to, one for each mailing list I'm on,
separate folders for any official/bureaucratic institution, etc., and
quite a few (semi-)temporary folders on top of that. Hey, I've just
counted them: 295 at the moment! I have also quite a lot of autosave
rules in my sieve scripts. Examples:

Shopping/Electronics/Scheissung_de
Shopping/Clothes/GryaznyeNoski_ru
Shopping/Other/UselessGizmos_com
...
Companies/ACME_com
...
People/Joe_F_Random
...
Lists/dovecot_org
...
Official/Office_For_Socks_Colors
...
SPAM/Incoming # spam filter puts them here
SPAM/Archive # confirmed spam, for mass-training the filter if needed
SPAM/Ham # not really spam, move mails here to retrain the filter
SPAM/Spam # really spam, move mails here to retrain the filter
SPAM/last_chance # one more and I'll block you at the MTA
SPAM/stats # automatic emails with filter stats
...
Temp/That_newsletter_I_am_not_sure_is_worth_it
Temp/Notifications_I_turned_on_to_see_if_they_are_useful_at_all
...
and so on

Fortunately, I am an old Unix/C chap and I HATE whitespace in names,
but I use a lot of underscores instead, for good measure :-)

Also fortunately, I am my own admin, so I know what to avoid and if I
screw something I may blame myself. And I really get the importance of
having LAYOUT=fs on my maildirs!

On the other hand, some users just keep everything in INBOX and their
client just marks emails as deleted and never expunges... The cur
directories grow and grow... Well, I still have a lot of space on
an ext4 FS, so I do not care to educate them yet.

-- 
Piotr "Malgond" Auksztulewicz                     firstname at lastname.net