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Archiving emails - what do you do?
Neil Lee | Jun 21 2006
For the longest time I have been the mad professor of email folders, with tons of separate folders organized by subject (particular clients, administrivia, personal, etc.). I have been fairly religious about keeping my inbox empty and use a fairly rigorous system of filters and popfile to tag, categorize, and redirect incoming email into the proper folder. I've been looking at Merlin's three-folder system as well as Gina Trapani's Trusted Trio action-based system and they make a lot of sense to me. But one flaw with these systems is they don't account for long-term storage of emails after they've passed through the Action|Hold|Archive process. So, how do you handle the archiving of email? I run Mac OS X and while spotlight does a pretty good job of finding email, I would assume that at some point having some kind of folder hierarchy is still necessary. Or is it? 12 Comments
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 From the inbox, my emails...Submitted by Craig on June 22, 2006 - 6:49am.
From the inbox, my emails go into one of three places: I abandoned categorizing my archived mails a while back and I am VERY happy that I did. The search engines at my disposal can find anything I need no matter where it's saved. I tried "tagging" solutions as an interim measure, but I decided even that was overkill, as I've never not been able to find an email I was looking for just using search. The Short-term Archive folder is for things like emails proposing times for a meeting: until that meeting date is set, I should hang onto the message, but I certainly don't need it permanently. The theory is that I can delete the oldest messages in the STA (say, six months old and older) at any point and be fine. My Archive folder is actually "Archive (current yr)," and I have older archive folders for previous years, just to make browsing them a little snappier. Of course searches go across all folders. I'm using OSX Mail, and Mail Act-on to file messages with a keypress. Hope this helps. » POSTED IN:
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