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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 use folders because it's...Submitted by Colin (not verified) on November 17, 2006 - 9:35am.
I use folders because it's about as quick for me to create new mailboxes and modify my act-on rules as it is to create new tags, and my searches go much faster when I can search the contents of a single folder than when I need to search for a tag in addition to my normal search criteria. This works well for me because I have a fairly discrete set of "projects." I'm a graduate student, so every semester I have three mailboxes for classes, a mailbox for my graduate assistant work, one for department news, and then GTD-like mailboxes for "to reply" and "waiting for response." Every semester, I just create new folders for my three classes, change my act-on rules for ctrl-4, 5, and 6 to correspond to the new classes, and drop the old folders into my Archive folder. » POSTED IN:
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