I love doing email now that I've adopted a "hacker" (at least to me) email setup—the emacs notmuch client (with afew for tagging). To me, a well-designed keyboard-based interface with very low latency can't be beat.

This might be old news to many of you. I have one account that I haven't migrated yet because it is so badly maintained, with tens of thousands of junk mails but a few I'll want to keep for the record. Any tips?

What do you mean by tips? What exactly are you expecting. since the way you've described it in your post you've got everything setup and working as you'd expect.

It just seems like sifting through all that mail will be a big chore and I could be overwhelmed. I can see that I can setup filters that will get it all out of my "inbox" query, but I'm still kinda worried about gumming up the search. I have it setup but I'm still pretty new to it and don't have a strong sense of what my ideal configuration and filter rules will be.

The most efficient way to sort a massive email backlog is to just not do it. The amount of space it is taking up is effectively zero compared to modern disk drives and if you ever do need to find something you'll be using a search function anyway so it won't really make any practical difference if you are searching through 1000 vs 100,000 emails. If you really, really, really want to sort through them or you just have no choice the trick to dealing with big backlogs is to process them in batches by the from address. So say your first email in the backlog is from newsletter@somesite.com. Just filter to see them all, most of the time you'll be able to tell it's all junk and just select all and delete. Occasionally you might need to do a little extra filtering, you might have some receipts you want to keep and also a newsletter from the same address that you don't need for example. Just refine the filter if theres a lot of them or just scroll down through them and sort them manually. That way you can easily get through a couple hundred mails at a time in a few seconds per from address and make a real dent in the backlog in no time.

You should clarify that point in the post cause I don't think it comes across very clearly. To answer your actual comment from my experience: use your inbox as a waystore for email you have yet to read or need to act on and tag heavily! I have a script setup that auto tags new mail based on a series of rules. For example an email from PayPal saying payment authorised is tagged financial and inbox. An email from camelcamelcamel saying price drop alert is tagged price, alert and inbox.you shouldn't make any mail skip your inbox except spam. Almost any kind of periodic mail you expect to get frequently or search later should be tagged (ideally automatically). On emacs I normally manually search by tag (so notmuch-search-by-tag) and if that's too verbose I narrow down using filter search or tag again. Normally I don't need to do more than 2 or 3 searches to get where I'm trying to go. A good thing about emacs and notmuch is notmuch buffers are regular buffers so if filtering a search is too costly (maybe you only have a fuzzy recollection of what you're looking for) you can use the regular searching tools without changing the search results so swiper or isearch or whatever you prefer. For actually managing mail I have a series of commands under leader+leader which toggle or attach tags to the current mail or all the mails in the selected region. My leader key is ,. So ,+,+i lets me remove the inbox tag, ,+,+d adds the delete tag ,+,+f adds the flagged tag and ,+,+s adds the spam tag. Of course you can also use the standard tagging functions provided by notmuch. This let's me quickly mark and remove irrelevant or uncessary emails from my inbox. I try to avoid deleting emails so most of the time I just remove the inbox tag and their left tagless.

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> with tens of thousands of junk mails but a few I'll want to keep for the record. Any tips? Xapian is _fast_, a few ten thousand emails is nothing. Just leave it be and use `notmuch-search`.

It is old news. But ya know what? Every new thing I use emacs for, and I've been using it for more than 30 years, gives me a blast of that.

This is probably what I'll do. Thanks!

Oooo, I should experiment with tweaking my leader key and writing some more custom commands. I'm bit lazy about this sometimes.

Haha, this describes the process that I kinda dread and will most likely follow the advice of not doing it.

If I use mu4e is there an easy way for me to try notmuch with my current maildir? My recollection is that there was ae incompatibility in how mail was stored.