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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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 Mail.app with MailTags and Smart Folders (with optional Mail ActSubmitted by caseykoons on July 17, 2006 - 8:14pm.
I used to be the same way, with millions of folders trying to encompass everything that I received. I used to delete nothing, saving one-line/short-term emails in a folder forever. The result was that I stressed a lot trying to get the right combination of categories, and never once went looking for something in the tangled mess. Inspired by Merlin and Gina's "Trusted Trio" I implemented the following. I love it! I use Action | Hold | Archive folders. The vast majority of the mail I receive is read and deleted. The few things that I deem "keepable" go into the Archive. Through the use of MailTags I give the mails Keywords like "Friends" "Funny" "Buddhism", whatever the message is saved for. I can and often use multiple keywords for a single message. I'm an avid role-player and many of my messages get "Gaming" and "Friends" tags. I set up Smart Folders to capture all the messages with certain tags. This allows me to have the many-folder-categorization that I used to enjoy, but it doesn't limit which messages can be in which category. It is also completely extensible. If I think of a new category it can be instantly added to the system, without the other categories breaking down. I like this system so much, I want to expand it to other aspects of my digital life. » POSTED IN:
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