$ find ~/Maildir/inbox -type f | wc -l 31439 That's after filtering out bulk mail and mailing lists. I'm a gmail user multiple times over, but use mutt + I

$ find ~/Maildir/inbox -type f | wc -l 31439 That's after filtering out bulk mail and mailing lists. I'm a gmail user multiple times over, but use mutt + IMAP instead of webmail, which I visit once in a blue moon to do a tricky search. Yeah, I should probably practice Real Inbox Zero, but mutt's new message flag is usually good enough. It's nice having new messages in full threaded context. To get Inbox Zero in mutt, with full threads for each new message, I guess I'd have to switch to something like mutt-kz [1]. (If anyone has pointers here, I'm all ears.) Also: $ find ~/Maildir/read -type f | wc -l 53774 I've got archived mail dating back to 2006. Every once in a while I take old messages from 'inbox' and move them to 'read' to make things more manageable. It's a pretty low-tech setup. There are surely lots of fancy things I'm missing out on. Having all your mail locally and in a hackable format inside Maildirs lets you do some pretty interesting stuff though. For example, here's a shell one-liner that generates a time series of my mail volume (gnuplot tail not included): https://twitter.com/alangrow/status/448965593564078080 https://twitter.com/alangrow/status/448965593564078080 [1] https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz