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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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 My reason to have a...Submitted by Laura M. (not verified) on November 20, 2006 - 9:14pm.
My reason to have a bizantine filing system: Shared folders. At work we use Novell's Groupwise. You have two possibilities for sharing your emails, proxy access and shared folders. Sometimes, depending on the project and if my colleague doesn't need to have access to all my emails, I'll just share a folder with him/her. In that case, you need to file all the relevant emails in that particular folder. At home I use Thunderbird, and apart from a folder for online shopping and subscriptions (just like Merlin), my inbox is just a continous stream of mixed junk and personal email. » POSTED IN:
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