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

[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*