On Tue, 22 Nov 2016 09:48:11 -0500 Tanstaafl tanstaafl@libertytrek.org wrote:
I'm trying for the life of me to see a use case for anywhere close to 1,000 folders, and am failing. That would be a major problem just from the human side. How do you find anything?
Hierarchy/drilldown.
I'm on what, maybe 70 mailing lists like this one. Many I've been on for more than a decade, so I have an OLDFOLDERS folder containing subfolders for each mailing list, each of which have their own subfolder by year.
The three email clients I ever used: Eudora (on Windows 98), Kmail and Claws-Mail had a collapsible outline view of all my folders and subfolders, making drilldown trivial. They all also had recursive searches. So 90% of the time, I just went to the current folder for the mailing list. The rest of the time, I used drilldown and recursive search. In less than 1% of cases was I unable to find an email I knew existed.
I imagine if I'd started with Alpine, I might have had fewer folders with more messages. But given the ease my past email clients had with viewing my folders as a drillable hierarchy, doing it the way I did it was trivial. And from a human point of view, the best way to organize things is in a hierarchy, like a room of file cabinets, a Linux filesystem, or a computer menu.
SteveT
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