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

[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...

[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/*.

[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.

[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.

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).

[icebluenothing.livejournal.com]

Folders are dead. Tags = win.

[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.