For a while I’ve been using GMane for almost all the mailing list I’m following. This made it much easier to deal with it because it mean that I didn’t have to download a local copy of all the messages and it also allowed me for a much cleaner access to archives. Unfortunately this has a downside, as it requires me to use an NNTP client, which is something that hasn’t been much cool to do lately.
In the last few few months I’ve used gnus as my client, but the problem with that is that it still needs a separate software from Evolution (which is my mail client0, and it had the nasty issue of not saving the read messages when emacs closed unexpectedly, say when X died, and because of a bug, emacs daemon died with it.
Now of course I could use mailing lists like most of the other people in the world do, by receiving them on my mail account, but I’d rather not fill my GMail “All Mail” folder with all the messages coming from mailing list, especially for when I have to access that data from an UMTS connection where I pay the traffic.
What other solutions are there for me? I’m considering the idea of doing what I did when there was a limit of 20MB on an email account from my provider, but no limit on the number of accounts, having one account per mailing list. Now the limit is 1GB but I haven’t been using those accounts in quite a long time. Even if they are available in IMAP when I’m on their connection they are only available through webmail from outside; not like that’s too much of an issue for me, since I need mailing list mostly when I’m not around hospitals or stuff like that, so I could just use that.
For this to work, though, I need a few tools working on IMAP, for instance I’d need a script that could expunge old archives, when the threads haven’t been updated in the last few months; I’ll also need a script that would automatically filter the mailing list as they arrive in Inbox (waiting with the IDLE command), since my provider does not allow me to filter the messages server-side. And such a script will have to run on Yamato since it has to be on their network.
Then there is the problem that Evolution saves its cache in my home directory, which is under RAID6; there is no need for the cache to be on my home, when XDG_CACHE_DIR is pointing to a private subdirectory in /var/cache. This includes the 200MB of SQLite database that is currently using. Does anybody know if there is a way to get Evolution to respect the XDG_CACHE_DIR variable?
