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Vox Pop: Sell me on manual email filing
Merlin Mann | Nov 17 2006
Lots of the kids are excited about the arrival of MsgFiler, which is a neat litte app for helping you file away your messages in Mail.app:
Zesty. But I'll just play devil's advocate on this one: if you find yourself inordinately excited about the arrival of this (admittedly clever) application, there's an excellent chance that your email archiving system is unnecessarily complex and, in fact, is in need of a major streamlining. Discuss. Me? Here's my own folder hierarchy (and the Mail Act-on key I use to send selected messages there.):
That's it. Personally, I abandoned the byzantine filing system quite a while ago, and so far -- given a mindful combination of Smart Folders and Spotlight -- I've yet to find a compelling case for manually filing beyond a depth of more than one folder. So, my larger question for you guys with more than, say, five or so archive sub-folders: How often are you using your archiving hierarchy to retrieve old mail? In other words, give me your success stories and best practices by which the time spent on meticulous manual filing has paid outsize rewards in finding stuff later. Or, perhaps better put: what are the limitations of Smart Folders, and what would need to change about them to get you out of the manual filing routine? Because, I gotta tell you, it kinda seems like a lot of busy work given what seems like modest functional pay-off. But you school me... 66 Comments
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 Due to similar words, subjects...Submitted by devotion (not verified) on November 18, 2006 - 1:28pm.
Due to similar words, subjects and phrases used across multiple projects, there is no way I can do anything but file into sub folders to be able to later search for mail threads for a specific project or job task. And a few times a month, I do need to search (to quote previous discussions, confirm sign-offs, etc). Also, if I sub file, I can then export those project-related messages quickly and archive those messages with the other project files/documents for backup. No really a school(ing), but hopefully some insight for Merlin. I think MsgFiler has the potential to grow into an even more powerful filtering tool that might autolearn or suggest filing techniques based on current incoming mail patterns. » POSTED IN:
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