Merlin Mann is dead on. I have one email archive for each of my inboxes (a Personal Archive for my personal account and a Work Archive for my work email).
Everytime I open Mail.app, I open my inboxes and look at whats in them. I use the email threading feature in Mail.app, so threads collapse together. This means I typically have a few tens of items (as threads are collapsed). I do a quick scan through, reply to the fast ones, send the rest that need action to iGTD by hitting F5, and then use Mail-Act-On so that Cmd-A Ctrl-A sends everything in my inbox to the correct Archive folder (I've bound Ctrl-A to the Mail-Act-On rule that sends all selected email to the correct Archive folder). Bim bam boom.
When I need to find something, I use Spotlight in Mail.app. It's just that simple.
My advice to you is simple: declare email bankruptcy. Create an Archive folder, move all your existing email from your Inbox to your Archive folder. Forget about it. No matter what you may think, you will discover 99% of all email that's been in your inbox more than 24 hours does not really need to be acted on (although it may need to be refered to later).
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My inbox is empty. My inbox is almost *always* empty
Date: 2007-07-28 03:42 am (UTC)Merlin Mann is dead on. I have one email archive for each of my inboxes (a Personal Archive for my personal account and a Work Archive for my work email).
Everytime I open Mail.app, I open my inboxes and look at whats in them. I use the email threading feature in Mail.app, so threads collapse together. This means I typically have a few tens of items (as threads are collapsed). I do a quick scan through, reply to the fast ones, send the rest that need action to iGTD by hitting F5, and then use Mail-Act-On so that Cmd-A Ctrl-A sends everything in my inbox to the correct Archive folder (I've bound Ctrl-A to the Mail-Act-On rule that sends all selected email to the correct Archive folder). Bim bam boom.
When I need to find something, I use Spotlight in Mail.app. It's just that simple.
My advice to you is simple: declare email bankruptcy. Create an Archive folder, move all your existing email from your Inbox to your Archive folder. Forget about it. No matter what you may think, you will discover 99% of all email that's been in your inbox more than 24 hours does not really need to be acted on (although it may need to be refered to later).