The following script will make a list of which folders exist in an IMAP account. The script requires you pass hostname, accountname and password on the commandline, but it should be quite easy to change as you like.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use Mail::IMAPClient::BodyStructure; use Mail::IMAPClient; my ($serv, $usr, $pwd) = (@ARGV); # server, username and password as comandline parameters... my $imap = Mail::IMAPClient->new(Server=>$serv,User=>$usr,Password=>$pwd); my @folders = $imap->folders; foreach my $f (@folders) { print "$f is a folder with ", $imap->message\_count($f), " messages.
It took just over a year, but I’ve finally done it. My inbox contains zero messages. It is a little bit scary, since it hasn’t been empty for the past… well since it was created over a decade ago. I’m not sure it’ll stay there on a daily basis, but I’m quite sure it’ll never reach the thousands of messages ever again. I’ve have been toying with GTD, and while it would probably be more efficient to dive in and go completely native (in GTD), I’m taking the slow adoption curve and try to adopt practices one step at a time and letting them prove to me, that they actually work.
With email, instant messaging, texting and mobile phones, we’re always reachable. Being available always can be a problem. Here are a few tips on how to detach your self sometimes and get a little time to get work done. Your email client doesn’t need to be running when your computer is turned on. People sending email doesn’t expect an instant answer. Turn you mail client off, and start it when you switch to ”mail processing mode”.
It seems most software has a lot of features, that we don’t know about or don’t use. Some of these features can actually prove themselves highly valuable in the every usage of a given program, and one of the small but powerful tips is how to color code your mail. I used to have an inbox with more than a thousand messages lying around. Through some heavy vetting and through cleaning it’s rarely below a hundred messages.
It seems most people are capable of launching an email application and do understand most of the technical skills required to use the application. It does however also seem that a fairly large part of the same people lack the social intelligence and skills required to make efficient use of their email capabilities. Scanning through my inbox I saw a fair and typical number of examples in the ”bad email usage” category.