Email coping mechanisms

[kickaha]

Okay, so now that my Inbox hit 2600 unsorted msgs today, dating back to January 2006 (that's before we moved up here, note), I decided to roll up my sleeves and take care of this crap. I've been deleting like a madman - I have trashed *SO MANY* stupid jokes sent by family members. I've moved all pics sent by friends and family that were, like, actual pictures and not ZOMG! LOOK AT THIS! images to iPhoto, properly tagged and bagged. I'm down to 1400msgs or so, and still culling.

Now... what to do with them when I'm done? Traditionally, I've meticulously sorted them into folders (I have about, oh... 90 or so, all nicely hierarchical and organized), but a) this is a pain, b) this cuts up conversations among many people into a plethora of snippets in different folders (which I hate). But, the alternative has always been to just... lump them. And that seems like such a nightmare. I've been doing it this way since 1990 or so, and I have a basically complete record of all non-trivial, non-spam email since 1992. (Yeah, scary huh? It's interesting to use it as an ad hoc diary of sorts, to go back and reread conversations with friends then and now, to see my own words and thoughts, and how they've changed... it's kind of terrifying, yet neat.)

Was watching Merlin Mann's inboxzero talk at Google though, and he suggests exactly that: one, and exactly one, folder for all email worth saving, named 'Archive'. Once I was able to get my intestines to stop spasming at the idea, he had a good point... we have these little things called 'search' and 'metadata'... so why not use them?

I realized he is, as he often is, quite spot on. Why should I put *any* work into organizing my mail, when I can search through thousands upon thousands of messages generally faster than I can manually look for what I want? When I use search *anyway* to look for things, why do I have it set up to artificially limit where I'm searching?

So what're y'all's coping mechanisms?

Comments

[eridan.livejournal.com]

www.gmail.com

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

So I assume that's a vote for 'save it all, let godmail sort it out'.

Okay, since I haven't much inclination to migrate everything to gmail, that's not happening directly, but I can replicate it within Mail... :)

[gwywnnydd.livejournal.com]

Well, my first coping mechanism is inbox rules that sort mailing list mail into sub-folders immediately. Beyond that, I am obsessive about reading my mail, so I don't have unread stuff. I'll usually go through a sort and purge every couple of months. But in general I just accept that my .PST file is going to keep growing...

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Okay, so that's a vote for 'file explicitly'. That's pretty much what I've tried to do over the years, but metadata search is creeping into my workflow.

[badger.livejournal.com]

I have one inbox. I read email umm, obsessively (quit laughing). Much of it is skim and delete. Another much is read, save into folder. To find older mail I've saved into folders, I either a) go to folder or b) q pine and grep mail/*.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

So, another multiple folder kinda guy.

k.

[night-monkey.livejournal.com]

I have three folders other than my INBOX:

KEEP - My general archive
SPARTAN - From my current or previous job
JOBS - Where I put all my job lead correspondence

I used to split it up into individuals when I got tons of work e-mail, but these days, I keep up with most of my friends via blogging, and those notification e-mails go to my z6 spacemonkeymafia account, and are deleted as read, since I have them on LJ. I do need to look into archiving LJ at some point or another, since I've been on here a few years. Would hate for a chunk of my online life to disappear.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Agreed on the archiving LJ... there's got to be a way to do that. I'd like to save the comments too, since that's one thing I *have* purged immediately from my Inbox... :)

I'm considering something similar... Archive folders for Personal, Work, and Other, and nothing further subdivided than that.

[ginkgo.livejournal.com]

I find this question kind of weird.

You were thrilled with spotlight when it was added...

It sounds like you need action folders (respond/event/strip off attachments and delete/delete in x month) and an archive folder and spotlight will take care of the rest. It seems like you're making a ton of work for yourself otherwise.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's the realization I'm coming to - there's just 15 years of inertia in the current setup.

The problem is that Mail doesn't let you add your *own* metadata tags to messages, which is annoying. I have an add-on to do it, but it doesn't give me quite the workflow I'd like. *shrug*

My inbox is empty. My inbox is almost *always* empty

[actsofcreation.livejournal.com]

And I get a few thousand emails a week.

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).

Re: My inbox is empty. My inbox is almost *always* empty

[actsofcreation.livejournal.com]

Oh, it should be pointed out, almost *every* interaction with my inbox ends with it being empty.

Re: My inbox is empty. My inbox is almost *always* empty

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's pretty much where I'm headed. Went through and did some simple searches to cull about 50% of what was in my Inbox, did a quick sort by Size to make sure that I snagged attachments I was interested in (and purged the rest), then the remaining 1300 msgs went into an Archive folder.

I now have three messages that I need to attend to, and I'll send those to OmniFocus as new items, then move them to the Archive as well. Keen.

Experimenting with Smart Folders, metadata, etc, to see what works best for common searches and use patterns.

[icebluenothing.livejournal.com]

Folders are dead. Tags = win.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

That's my feeling as well - unfortunately, for the ubiquity of metadata tags everywhere else, MacOS X's default Mail client doesn't offer a UI for it. :P So, I'm experimenting.

But yeah, for right now, 1-3 Archive folders, Smart Folders based on 'normal' searches when necessary, and otherwise... meh. Not going to worry about it excessively.

[jason0x21.livejournal.com]

Gmail offers tags. And automatic tagging. And a big archive folder. GMAIL FTW.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Alright, last question:

Can I send mail from that account and have it appear as my regular email account? I don't mean Reply-To, but honest to god regular account in the From line as well. If not, it won't work for me.

I mean sure, I can have all my accounts forward to it, but if I can't send from them as well, it's simply not going to work for various reasons, and Reply-To won't cut it.

[jason0x21.livejournal.com]

Yes. It's what I do for XDU all the time. All the wxdu.org accounts are actually gmail accounts set up in exactly that manner. As long as you "own" that address that you're trying to spoof, you're alright.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Must ponder.

Secure HTTP an option? Not seeing it on their site... HMMmm... Off to pore over Terms of Service...

[ssandv.livejournal.com]

Yes, GMail has https. For some bizarre reason, it's completely optional though, so it's easy to screw up. There's a couple Firefox addins/greasemonkey hacks to ensure you end up on the https page. Dunno what there is for Safari though.

And yes, you can set your mailto: to gmail, though I'm not sure quite how that's done. I just downloaded some TSR or other and it had a checkbox that I clicked and *poof*.

[ssandv.livejournal.com]

Gmail. Tagging, remote access, and migration isn't that hard. I moved something like 500 messages when I made the switch. I'm willing to bet someone out there has written a program to do it for the Mac, and if not, you probably could figure it out pretty quickly. There's a way to send all the messages from your local machine into gmail, and if you're a bit clever with pre-tagging (if you set up an appropriate filter in gmail, and send things to foo+bar@gmail.com, they go to foo@gmail.com, but the filter will see that they were sent to foo+bar, so it's easy to preserve existing folder structure with tags, if you're so inclined.)

Just make sure it waits a few seconds between mails, and kick it off on your way to bed.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Alright thanks, this is all gelling in my head into A NEW PLAN! *bum bum bummmmm*