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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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 I'm excited about this application...Submitted by Ryan Norbauer (not verified) on November 17, 2006 - 1:23pm.
I'm excited about this application (which performs more smoothly something I was using an AppleScript for previously). There is often important information about a message that Mail.app's otherwise wonderful search would never capture. Sometimes, you just don't remember the right keywords, even though you know what you want. For example, I keep a folder of "praise" for my company's product (Lovetastic.com). I often want to pull quotes out of this to put on the site or for dealings with the press, etc. However, if I just dumped everything into a "correspondence" folder (which is where I put 90% of my mail), I'd never be able to single those messages out. I don't remember the name of every customer who's ever said a nice thing about our product, nor do I remember the precise words they used. I have thousands and thousands of messages filed in IMAP, but about 10% of them in about 15-20 special-case folders like this where no plain-text search will be smart enough to get the group of messages that I need. Other examples where no one text string would pull all the emails I want: "hosting," "rails," "legal," "press coverage," etc. Everything else that is just correspondence with a person about some random topic (that I would be able to pull up just by remembering the name of the person corresponding with me.) A little bit of human categorization is necessary from time to time. » POSTED IN:
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