Hello,

I have multiple accounts (identities) all arriving in the same IMAP hierarchy. My question is about the inbox and it assumes that the accounts aren't orthogonal (otherwise you can just use a mail filter and have an inbox for each identity), i.e. private mail may be hobby-related, and work mail might relate to my research.

If private mail arrives in the same inbox as does work mail, hobby mail, research mail, etc., it's all a big mess and makes it hard to concentrate on one task only. Say I am at work, then I want to only get work mail and not run the chance to even see or be distracted by a private or hobby email.

My mail setup is not based on fancy Mail.app but rather on Unix command line tools (they give me flexibility in other ways which GUI tools do not), so I do not have tags or virtual/smart folders at my disposal, really. But even if I did, would they actually be suitable?

Do you receive mail in different contexts (e.g. work vs. research vs. private) which may be related (i.e. some private mail might be interesting even during work, since it's related to work)? How do you deal with this?