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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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 Small point about, why not...Submitted by Mark Grimes (not verified) on November 17, 2006 - 8:02am.
Small point about, why not have one mailbox and smart folder everything. This is fine if you have a modest amount of email, but not when it's your main communication mechanism. I only keep smart folders for tracking flagged messages and recent work email. I stopped making smart folders for MailTag projects because well... on my little G4 1.25 powerbook, blowing through my email for a particular MailTag project each time I click the smart folder is well -- slow. I'm not sold on smart folders, but clearly sold on MailActOn and MailTags2. I do use spotlight but only when searching not for day to day folder browsing. I'm willing to take the performance hit of spotlighting my email to save eyeballing the particular email I'm looking for, but all the time when I click on mail folders -- I'll pass. » POSTED IN:
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