I do much as you’re doing now, but I split the archive folder up by years — this keeps performance from getting too ugly. Right now, for example, everything’s going into “2004 Archive”.

I never understood why I would need 50 zillion email folders once I had a decent way to search my email.

I wrote an e-mail management report a couple of years ago, detailing my system -

http://www.goodexperience.com/reports/e-mail/email-report-goodexperience.pdf

I’ve tried this, but I still find it useful to sort email by project so that I can see all of a project’s email at a glance. I have a relatively low email volume, and so all of my email goes into a project folder or an archive, or, if it needs to be dealt with in the next week, an ‘~ Action’ folder or a ‘~ Read + Review’ folder for longer messages. Works for me!

Hmmmm… Thunderbird lets you flag and label, but it ony allows 5 different labels. That’s probably a bit too macro to be super-useful…

For searching in Outlook I use a great, free tool called Lookout. It does a much better job of searching old mail than Outlook alone and it searches all of Outlook including the Contacts and Calendar. Get it here http://www.lookoutsoft.com/Lookout/

I ran across Mark’s e-mail method earlier this year and it’s served me well ever since. And with Mail.appetizer (http://www.bronsonbeta.com/mailappetizer/) on-screen notifications of incoming e-mail, I can quickly filter e-mail that I could get rid of in 5 minutes or less. As a side benefit, I’ve discovered that people tend to freak out (in a good way) if you respond to their e-mail in less than 5 minutes. Never underestimate the power of an empty inbox.

The best way to handle email is the old fashioned way (which I must admit I no longer do). In a unix shell all emails were separate text files in an in-box directory, this easily lends itself to small shell scripts to search, organize and otherwise manage email.

The rise of HTML email and GUI mail clients has pretty much made this impossible, though in time with filters, X, copernic and other search tools, we’re getting close to what we had before. At the end of the day though, I’d MUCH rather have my email exist in a human readable text format than some monolithic proprietary binary thing.

I use basically the same method, but it’s not working for me. The problem is the tiny detail of what you call your ‘@flag’ folder. With the volume of email I get, and the number of them that qualify as a To Do Item, I end up with a 200-email folder, with stuff at the bottom that gets consistently neglected. Well, I can’t have that! So I stop using that folder and leave the important To Do Items in my inbox, which currently stands at 768 items waiting for my attention, plus today’s new mail.

At some point, the principles of GTD can only be achieved with an assistant. I think I’ll outsource my inbox to Bangalor.

Man, I would really love to use Yahoo like this. They just bought Oddpost, so hopefully that will be a boost. Any advice on using Yahoo to utilize the principles of GTD? I just can’t pull myself away to another app. Am I therefore DOOMED!?

When I send something to archive I typically edit it for conciseness and add keywords and phrases to make it easier to find later.

A correspondent may not use the same terms I would choose, or they may abbreviate or otherwise leave out helpful information, so I add it myself.

When I originate a message that has lasting value (to me) I send a BCC to my archive. (Instead of relying on my Sent folder and letting it grow huge.)

How does one create folders within individual accounts like in your screen grab? I see you have your “fm” account with subfolders, and also you “Dot Mac” account.

I’m running for different accounts under the “Inbox,” but when I create a new folder, it gets shoved down to the bottom — underneath the “Junk” folder. Mail won’t let me drag them so that they become folders under individual account?

Help.

How does one create folders within individual accounts like in your screen grab?

I think the easiest way is to select the folder into which you want the new folder created, then click the “+” button at the bottom of the drawer.

Let me know how that works for you.

Veen, I hear ya, man. I really need the inbox as the “this must be dealt with space” since a folder labeled “To Do” is too ignorable.

I file or delete as I read for non-action items.

I use filters to put certain like things which will not be urgent into other folders (e.g. our customer listserv, programming change messages from the source control system, the lists for other departments which I need to monitor, etc.) Then I use Eudora’s underlining & bolding of folder names with unread messages to nudge me to check those.

I use labels to identify things in my inbox which belong to a particular role, task or project and those labels are in the real priority order for working on those things.

The messages labelled with the bottom category, though I acknowledge it as important, when the size of my inbox starts to stress me out are grabbed and dragged over into a folder called “To Do” where I dream that I will someday get to them.

What I’m thinking I really need to get better at is sending a message saying “I received your email. This will require some research. I’ll get back to you when I have more information.” Right now they get nothing while the letter languishes. This treatment is dished out primarily to co-workers and biz dev people from other companies. Boy, do I wish I had an admin.

Since the empty inbox is a pipe dream for me, I get some of that “Aaahh, I have accomplished things” feeling from having everything marked as read.

[Oddly enough I had to launch IE in order to post this because I saw no Preview or Post buttons in Firefox. Not sure what was going on there…]

I find that Opera’s built-in email client (“the email client formerly known as M2”) does everything that Gmail does, but does it on your local box. Everything is indexed, you can search, sort by label, etc. and then just press “K” for “This item has been read” and it drops into your archive. If you want, you can also get just the stand-alone email client without the browser, named Hugin.

I’ve found that Mail.app has trouble using IMAP sometimes. If I try to make a rule that puts a message into a different folder (e.g. for a mailing list), then Mail won’t let me select any of the subfolders of my IMAP account. I finally created an applescript to do it, so if anyone is having problems of that sort I can post the applescript if you want.

This must be in the air. I started using Lookout a few months ago. Once I had confidence in it I made my Outlook folders into “categories”. (Every item in a folder was assigned a Category that mached the folder name — that way what I did next was potentially reversible).

I then dumped all my email into two folders:

save

and

save_older.

I did that it that way because Outlook’s Find command works well with a few hundred messages, and I keep “save” at that level. Periodically I cull “Save” by dumping messags into Save_older.

I have archive folders for tasks & notes. Contacts never get archived.

This saves me a ton of time on filing, and Lookout has made retrieval a dream.

you can actually add color labels to your mail via applescript:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/0596007183/chapter/hack37.pdf

works great!

you can actually add color labels to your mail via applescript

Yeah, unfortunately, that only works as a visual cue, I think; you can’t sort or find, as with labels. It does make me miss Eudora sometimes. :)

any ideas how to manage mailing list with this setup? I think Ill try this empty-inbox-idea but read a lot of mailing list and it doesn’t make sence to route all messages to the inbox and archive them if there are 10% messages that seems intresting (from subject) thanks for great site!

Martin, Since seeing this blog, I have followed the advice but still have some folders for some mailing lists on my IMAP setup. I have rules set up in mail.app and thunderbird (depending on If i’m using the mac or pc) which move certain mailing lists to their folder. (could be done server side also).

I am moving away from this though even, unsubscribing a lot or moving ones I read often to bloglines email subscription. (http://bloglines.com)

/atariboy

from 1000 to 0

Spurred on by the advice here, I have reduced my crazy inbox of over 1000 unsorted emails to 0. This…

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