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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 work as a web...Submitted by TC! (not verified) on November 17, 2006 - 7:45am.
I work as a web designer and sub contract work from other deisgn companies, they are my direct clients. I have one folder for each of them , so for example client1, client2, client3. I normally have one specific email address which each of them use to contact me (normally using their own domain) so it is easy for me to do a quick filter to get mail into the correct top level folder for each of my clients. I then create a sub folder for each project I'm working on for them. So my folder structure looks like this: Client1 - Project 1 - Project 2 Client2 - Project 1 - Project 2 etc. This makes it very easy to just select the one sub folder and know that I have all the information for that specific project to hand. I do have some special cases with projects where I may have another level of subfolders below the project level but they are rare. So I normally go to 2 levels of subfolders but may sometimes get to three. » POSTED IN:
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