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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'm with Merlin and many...Submitted by Casey Koons (not verified) on November 20, 2006 - 5:43am.
I'm with Merlin and many of the others. I have 2 folders that are not my inbox. Reply To Archive And, seeing how much I use "Reply To" it may not be long for this earth. I use Mail Act-On and MailTags to tag emails that have a commonality. I find this much better than nested folders because messages can have more than one tag, and I can up with new tags as I need them. I have dozens of smart folders though. One for each of the tags. I use lots of address book groups to round up all my emails from students. One recent creation of shocking utility has been "Attach" folders. Essentially a smart folder that looks for: From: Someone/Somegroup, and Has Attachments. Every file my students have every sent me in one place. For more details look into my blog. I plan a Mail rant sometime there soon. » POSTED IN:
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