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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've got quite a few...Submitted by Gary Rogers (not verified) on November 18, 2006 - 4:43am.
I've got quite a few sub-folders, but for the most part they are where server logs land, and then I slog through those daily. Beyond that I've got archives, separated out into months. I don't use e-mail for much more than maintaining my communications. If there's an action item I use MailActOn and an Apple script to send it to Yojimbo. If there's something I think I should keep there's a different script that tags it as archive, drops into my monthly folder and into Yojimbo. Basically Yojimbo has replaced e-mail as my inbox. There I use tags to help me find things, but mostly I rely on serach to find what I'm looking for. » POSTED IN:
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