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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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 Merlin, More than 5 of...Submitted by Trevor Nelson (not verified) on November 17, 2006 - 7:27am.
Merlin, More than 5 of so sub-folders? I wish. Currently I have 38 sub-folders(Outlook user), and that's not counting the 18 sub-sub-folders that are archives. I'm a Project Manager in the construction industry and find that a seperate folder for each active project I manage is the only way to keep things straight. I find the need to manually file these this way is due in large part to the nature of the mail I get. In a number of cases the clients are sending notes that do not include the project name or any indicator that seperates it from the rest of the projects. This makes 'searching' useless. So the only way for me is to file every message in it's own project folder. Then I can search that folder alone for what I need. » POSTED IN:
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