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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 do like folders--I use...Submitted by kasmicb (not verified) on November 17, 2006 - 11:04am.
I do like folders--I use them more to limit searches than as project managers. At work I use Eudora and file mail by calendar year. For my Yahoo account, I have folders for a few current topics, one for receipts and order tracking, and one big archive. I am not a zero Inbox sort of person, I do clean out obvious stuff as I go and occasionally do a major archiving but I almost never have fewer than 50 messages in my Inbox. I have tried to use a "respond to" folder but found that it was easier just to keep messages in the Inbox and mark them Unread if they were urgent. » POSTED IN:
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