Home
Home email consists of two main addresses. One here at this domain and my Gmail address. Previously I had used Thunderbird to deal with my email, but after losing my mail files for what seemed to be the hundredth time, I decided to move to just going with IMAP / online only access. This was also driven home by the iPhone, since that seems to be what I use to first check my email. I recently set Gmail to poll my domain email into Gmail itself and tag it, so I only have one place to go for my mail. Yes, I realize that Google is potentially ‘evil’, but so far they haven’t proven themselves to me to be evil. Gmail works, I love the interface and it’s nice having all of my email going to one place. Additionally, it’s one less account to log into.

Work
My work email is a different beast. I have one email address, however, there is a ton of email generated daily by the ticket system, customers and coworkers. I’m currently downloading mail via POP3 and using Mutt to read it, since I need easy access to the mail if I’m ever logged into my machine remotely. However, the problem of searching said mail and trying to keep it archived is beginning to surface. I’ve got about 2 years of email in mbox format right now, which I rsync off of my box to another server for backup purposes. Searching these emails is a long, drawn out process, and I’m beginning to search for an alternative solution as far as email goes. I could convert to using IMAP and going that route, which would then give me a web-based interface from remote locations. This is what I’m looking at, however, I need to find a solution to searching the existing mail archives. I could attempt to roll my own solution, I could just use grep, or I could search around and see if I can find something else out there. I may end up posting something to a mailing list somewhere to see if anyone else has come across this problem.

Remind syntax is pretty basic, and rather than get into a full-blown tutorial right now, I’ll share a basic reminder entry from my .reminders file:

REM Nov 14 2008 AT 17:00 DURATION 1:00 MSG Timesheet

On November 14 at 5 PM, I need my timesheet done. Duration is one hour, and the message shown is Timesheet. If I look at this through Wyrd, I’ll see 17:00-18:00 blocked out on my calendar. Pretty nifty. So, where does cron fit in to this solution? Well, using cron and GXmessage, I can display a list of upcoming reminders. Here’s the line from my box at work:

30 07  *  *  *  export DISPLAY=:0.0 && remind -q -g ~/.reminders | gxmessage -title "Reminders" -file -

At 07:30am every morning, my machine generates a list of reminders for the day in a dialog box waiting for me when I unlock my machine. Eventually I may just send the reminders to my email, but for now the dialog box gets my attention much easier. The best part about this setup is that it will work under any desktop environment you have, it’s text/curses based and not heavy on resources at all. Other options I had evaluated, and why I didn’t choose them:

Sunbird/Lightning
At one point I was using Lightning and Thunderbird for email, but it got too heavy, and I couldn’t easily read email remotely with Thunderbird. Sunbird is just the standalone calendar app, but again, not easily checked remotely.

Google Calendar
I like to stay on the cautious side and not keep anything work related on servers outside of the realm of my workplace. While it would work OK, I don’t think it would sit well with the higher-ups. This also goes for any to-do type applications online.

Links

• Remind
• Wyrd

• Mutt – email
• Remind/Wyrd – reminders / calendar
• Todo.txt – Task list

I’m finding this setup is not quite effective as I like. I have to flip between three different terms in a screen session, need to remember keyboard shortcuts for things, and then also hope I have everything in either Remind or my todo.txt file. This setup is working for the most part, but it’s slowing me down a bit. For a while, I was using Thunderbird with the Lightning plugin for tasks and email, but I can’t really access that outside of the office without X forwarding, which I’ve found is painfully slow. There’s always the option of just reconfiguring mutt to point at Thunderbird’s mail directory, but that doesn’t help me much as far as tasks go.

I’m also trying to figure out the best way to organize notes. The setup for that is rather overkill: Mediawiki. I’ve got Apache, PHP and Mysql running on my workstation, and the wiki is installed. The more I think about it, though, the more it seems a little too overkill. I had tried Tiddlywiki, but that wasn’t robust enough for me. I think I’m going to do a bit more research and see if I can find a decent balance, perhaps something not dependent on a database. I’ve got a lot of information, but it’s pretty much tossed in the wiki without too much categorization. I’m thinking something with tagging would work best.