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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 have.... too many to...Submitted by Avril Flowers (not verified) on November 17, 2006 - 11:25am.
I have.... too many to count - two screens of nested folders, with about 5 top level categories (work, people, lists, newsletters, finances) with work having the most categories (clients - big list, BIG CUSTOMER, projects - big list, prospects, suppliers - small list). Most of these are autofiled. In fact, if I see email in my inbox its usually spam (or the few friends that I really must get around to writing a rule for) I have a huge number of rules, and it makes my email easy to manage. I have a large amount of unread email, but none of it is from clients. Who cares if I don't read newsletters or mailing lists while working? Not me! I don't go through folders looking for something very often, but when I do its usually slammingly fast. :) I'm using Thunderbird on OSX rather than Mail, as Mail has always been too slow for me :( So, yes, I am very happy with my folder organisation - I can see where I stand with a glance, rather than a search :) » POSTED IN:
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