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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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 Trevor, I also use Outlook and...Submitted by Justin Bajema (not verified) on November 17, 2006 - 7:47am.
Trevor, I also use Outlook and I'm involved in multiple projects. I also get my share of email relating to these projects that doesn't contain much referance to the specific project, which as you've said, makes searching a bit difficult. I moved from having a folder for each project to creating a in category in Outlook for each project. I then have a search folder set up for each category. This way, I just tag each message with its appropriate project category and then file it alway in one big archive folder. Then I can click on the search folders to see all the email for a specific project. The advantage here is that sometimes I get email relating to several projects, and I can tag it with both project and it will show up in the search folder for each project. I don't know how I'd do this with static folders. I'm not saying one way is better than the other, this is just how i've learned to handle my email. » POSTED IN:
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