Keeping track of the age of messages

Posted on October 27th, 2006 by Sacha Chua

I can get pretty bad at responding to e-mail. This is an experiment to see whether the negative reinforcement of seeing just how old a message is will help me be more responsive. Either that, or I can strive for a Mean Time Between Responses of whatever... ;)

Hmm, maybe I should combine this with my blog and start distinguishing between E-mail to and Reply to...

(defadvice gnus-post-news (around sacha/gnus-track-message-age activate)
  "Insert a header showing how old a message is, to shame me into replying faster."
  ;; Before you post the news, figure out how old it is
  (let (days)
    (when article-buffer
      (setq days
            (- (time-to-days (current-time))
               (time-to-days
                (gnus-date-get-time
                 (mail-header-date
                  (gnus-summary-article-header
                   (gnus-summary-article-number))))))))
    ad-do-it
    (when days
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (when (re-search-forward "--text follows this line--" nil t)
        (forward-line 1)
        (insert "In reply to a message sent by "
                (mail-header-from message-reply-headers)
                " "
                (cond
                 ((= days 0) "today")
                 ((= days 1) "yesterday")
                 (t (format "%d days ago" days)))
                ": \n\n")))))
(setq message-citation-line-function nil)

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