Nostalgy

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

by Kevin on Feb. 16, 2009 · permalink

I've had this extension installed for a while (on principle, being a devoted 'mutt' and formerly 'pine' user), but only really started using it after reading some of the "Inbox Zero"-type articles, such as those Lifehacker and similar sites like to run all the time (i.e., keep your inbox empty and use a small set of action-oriented folders and tagging instead of an overly-complex hierarchy).

Nostalgy works very, very well for this, as most of your email will go to "Archive" anyway (I name mine "@Something"s so they sorts near the top of the IMAP folder list) and a couple more keystrokes will send a message to any of your other folders (such as "@Action", "@WaitingFor", and so on). I also have a hierarchy of archived mail by-year (zz_archives/2007/..., zz_archives/2006/...), and Nostalgy can speedily save messages there, too, just by typing a few digits of the year, then a couple of down-arrows from there.

One thing I wish Nostalgy did better/differently is tagging. I'd like to see the "T" key bound to tag/untag messages, with the status bar changing to a (colorized?) display of your custom tags, where either typing the name or the number (0-9) assigned to the tag will assign it. I think I'll suggest this on the mailing list...

Thanks for a great extension, Alain! It's top-notch.