This many mail boxes is craziness.

I have

Inbox @NotMe @Processed @%name of pressing project%

I’m currently managing 8 major projects and 23 minor projects and this system works exactly as expected at most I run 5 mail boxes.

If you’re doing this much mail moving you should seriously re-evaluate what you’re doing.

I’m the developer of MsgFiler. We’re readying a new version of the app which addresses the -1700 error that some people have been experiencing (along with other issues). If you’re interested in testing it, let me know.

http://www.tow.com/software/msgfiler/

I don’t currently have much e-mail, but at a previous job copyediting and laying out articles for technical journals, I always had folders for each journal issue and subfolders for each article. E-mail would come in from all sorts of sources (multiple authors, editors, fellow production people) in all sorts of formats, beginning up to six months ahead of publication, and so had to be manually filed. A few weeks after the issue was done (to allow for stragglers), the folders would be archived. I often referred to e-mails in the folders.

The system worked beautifully; it seems to me to be the kind of context for which the above app would be useful.

I simply have a single archive folder that i move stuff to with spacebar (mail act-on action key) “a”. I use MailTags2 to tag my mail with the appropriate keyword (password, receipt, etc) and do lookups by keyword or otherwise project.

I do have several more folders then you — generally they are folders resembling ebill notifications, email from family, etc so I can apply a Growl applescript to only those folders I care about (e.g. not maillists). I used to use GrowlMail but the plugin is too coarse grain and backed down to an applescript so interruptions only hit particular folders and not all my new mail.

I have a folder called Purgatory which is a target mailbox for a mail act-on cleanup action (“c”) that dumps all mail that is not addressed specifically to me or sent by me into a bin for deletion. I only have this folder setup as a safety net as missing an email is BAD — same goes for spam filtering as there’s no such thing as being completely free and clear from false positives. This [clean up action] quickly gets rid of all the crufty email I get at work and all the maillist crap that I can inevitably read online in archives anyway.

Although slightly off-topic, aside from thinning my workflow down to Mail Act On and MailTags2 I am using GPGMail, MailFollowup, OMiC, SpamSieve (to accompany server side spamassassin) and IMAP IDLE.

I’m finally starting to get a good handle on my email thanks to all the GTD Mail.app posts between 43Folders and HawkWings. Probably a good thing since I use Mail.app for personal and my day job email.

I have…. too many to count - two screens of nested folders, with about 5 top level categories (work, people, lists, newsletters, finances) with work having the most categories (clients - big list, BIG CUSTOMER, projects - big list, prospects, suppliers - small list). Most of these are autofiled. In fact, if I see email in my inbox its usually spam (or the few friends that I really must get around to writing a rule for) I have a huge number of rules, and it makes my email easy to manage. I have a large amount of unread email, but none of it is from clients. Who cares if I don’t read newsletters or mailing lists while working? Not me! I don’t go through folders looking for something very often, but when I do its usually slammingly fast. :)

I’m using Thunderbird on OSX rather than Mail, as Mail has always been too slow for me :(

So, yes, I am very happy with my folder organisation - I can see where I stand with a glance, rather than a search :)

I do like folders—I use them more to limit searches than as project managers. At work I use Eudora and file mail by calendar year. For my Yahoo account, I have folders for a few current topics, one for receipts and order tracking, and one big archive. I am not a zero Inbox sort of person, I do clean out obvious stuff as I go and occasionally do a major archiving but I almost never have fewer than 50 messages in my Inbox. I have tried to use a “respond to” folder but found that it was easier just to keep messages in the Inbox and mark them Unread if they were urgent.

I think you’ve got it Merlin. Mine looks a lot like yours, except I have a “Student Emails” folder (and act-on action) and a “Flag this in Student Emails” for when students submit an assignment. This way I keep all those young’ens coralled, easily accessible, and easy to jump into when I need to sit down and get cracking on all those papers. Which is about now, sigh.

I have 6 main subfolders: one for work-related stuff, two that are specific to a couple of hobbies of mine (managed by rules), and one for my wife’s mail (we have never bothered to get separate addy’s—I just created a rule for her that I keep adding to as she gains new contacts whom I’ll never want to reply to). I have another one for a mailing list I still subscribe to (hard to believe they still exist) and one that mirrors my gmail inbox.

I also have a couple of subfolders and related rules for my .mac account. I set up .mac aliases for my blogs, which allow me to see right away when I get a reply to a post (yes, it does happen from time to time).

Interesting to read that I’m not the only one who finds “Today” and “Yesterday” smart folders useful. They’re a great way to ensure that something important doesn’t get overlooked (which can happen when, like me, you have a fair number of rules set up).

I use a hybrid approach. I have action/respond/waiting-for folders, and then project folders for the projects I’m currently working on. They’re basically reference filing. I delete them when I’m done with the project.

All of my email (sent and received) is automatically copied to my gmail account, which is purely for archiving. I can then search it easily if I need to find something.

well, i’m with trevor above - lots of project specific emails that need to be grouped in a folder because messages contain no indication of project name, and the sender might be associated with multiple projects such that search by sender fails…however, i’m now exploring dropping these windows folder habits and since i’m new to mac and using devonthin pro, i may create a master mail archive database and simply move emails into project folder archives in a database such that my actual email is nearly empty excluding active items (as in, a tiny email app with everything else moved to a structured database, instead of trying to turn mail.app into a database…though with mailtags, i could also drop folder as well, but i am concerned that mailtags might break or fall apart with the next release of mail and the os, and i can’t bank my business on a small freebie type plugin…no offense to mailtags, it’s a great idea, but really seems to be a utility versus a solution for all email archiving…

I use folders because it’s about as quick for me to create new mailboxes and modify my act-on rules as it is to create new tags, and my searches go much faster when I can search the contents of a single folder than when I need to search for a tag in addition to my normal search criteria.

This works well for me because I have a fairly discrete set of “projects.” I’m a graduate student, so every semester I have three mailboxes for classes, a mailbox for my graduate assistant work, one for department news, and then GTD-like mailboxes for “to reply” and “waiting for response.” Every semester, I just create new folders for my three classes, change my act-on rules for ctrl-4, 5, and 6 to correspond to the new classes, and drop the old folders into my Archive folder.

Since you’re already using a mac, you may as well use mutt with save-hooks. Save things to the right place with 2 keystrokes or so.

http://www.mutt.org/

I don’t use folders anymore. I don’t even use labels in my gmail account. One archive. Not even an action or reply folder. I delete, or reply to things immediately and archive them, or put them on a gtd list and archive them.

If I needed to find a receipt or account email, I can search. gmail’s search is so good I never have problems finding a past email in two seconds.

I’d be curious if or how Merlin is able to find archived mail related to a particular project. Mail Act-On does a super job of moving mail into his minimal folder hierarchy, but this system doesn’t do any tagging of mail to identify what project/topic/client the mail is related to. Sure this could be done by setting MailTags, but isn’t this just as or more cumbersome than filing away in a project subfolder?

Personally, I actually WANT to process my email from my inbox.

I’ve used mail filters in the past, and I’ve found that all it does is scatter messages everywhere. In an organized fashion of course, but they’re still scattered. If it’s not something I need to take action on or reference, I don’t need to be receiving it (spam filters are obviously useful). If I need to take action on it, I need to read it to make a decision about it, which normally involves moving it, tagging it, etc. If it’s reference, I need to look at it to see whether it’s actually something I want to keep (yeah, you can search everything you’ve ever received in your life, but why add more clutter if much of it is trash-worthy?).

If I had multiple accounts for different purposes (work, home, small business), I’d consider filtering those. And I’d consider filtering mailing lists. But otherwise, I want to make decisions on email as they come in.

I love smart folders, tags, etc. They’re INCREDIBLY useful. I just want to make use of them AFTER I’ve made decisions about what I’m getting.

(yeah, yeah, I know… I’m in the minority here… it’s all good)

I’m with lydgate, mutt to the rescue

I don’t have subfolders, but I do have about 10 mailboxes (or “folders” for you Mac people) sorted by context. Mutt has excellent threading so it’s very easy for me to add pertinent information to the subject, even if the customer didn’t originally, and track the conversation at a glance.

I’ve tried several mail clients and none of them handles the sheer volume of email as well as mutt.

I manage about 60 engineering (civil/mechanical/industrial) project at all times. I abandoned my complex nested folder structure for a simple 6 foler system.

Inbox Sent Archive (stuff to keep forever - could be useful in court) Keep 6 Weeks (tracking numbers, order confirmations, etc) Keep 12 Months (project related stuff that will not be needed once the project is completed) Someday\Maybe (stuff that I might want to respond to one day)

Most stuff gets turned into a Next Action and the email is deleted. Other stuff gets saved to the network project folder. I get my inbox down to no more than 3 messages at the end of each day.

I don’t usually manually file e-mail, but I have rules set up to do it automatically as it comes in. That way, I don’t need to hunt through the inbox for work-related things. When I’m working, I go straight to the appropriate folder (I have multiple “careers,” so there are different folders for each). Also, things like e-mail newsletters and such are shunted to appropriate folders, so that when I have a few minutes to read one, I can go straight to the one I want. I’m getting better at deleting things I don’t need (and, in fact, have been ruthlessly unsubscribing to things in the last couple days).

I strongly agree, though I do find some categories (which could easily be expressed as smart folders) indispensable — namely, folders related to projects (could be tagged) and certain groups of senders/lists (could be queried directly).

The problem I have is that Spotlight just doesn’t work nearly as well as e.g. Google:

1. Expressiveness. I want to be able to enter moderately complex queries quickly. Google’s ‘predicate:’ query syntax (used to great effect in Gmail) solves this very effectively. Being forced to start a search, then click around with my mouse on the different search mode buttons (all boxes vs. current box, from, to, subject, …), and STILL not being able to get a complex query just prevents me from doing 90% of the search-fu I intuitively do when trying to find something.

2. Speed. Spotlight is frustratingly slower than browsing real folders on my MacBook Pro (!)

3. Bugginess. Spotlight returns ghost messages, intermittently fails to find some things tagged with MailTags, and regularly deadlocks Mail in some vague “sorting” step when viewing smart folders.

Between (1) and (2), switching to Safari and running a Gmail search shortcut (though I don’t use Gmail, except as an archive) is still much faster, overall, requires less thinking (Google has trained me to think in complex queries), and returns more targeted results (since I can express more precision much more quickly in their query syntax), than trying to do the same thing through Mail’s built-in search.

Hopefully most of these issues will be remedied with 10.5 (some keywords have been explicitly mentioned, but as a whole all of this remains to be seen).

All that said, the reason why I’m excited to see MsgFiler is because I’ve wanted a way of quickly navigating between folders (filing aside) using only my keyboard. The Thunderbird plugin cited as the ostensible inspiration for MsgFiler lets you do just this, and MsgFiler seems to, as well (though I haven’t successfully tested it, since v1.0 throws Applescript exceptions so fast on my machine, I can’t even execute a single move). I live on cmd-[1,3,4], and have even made triggers+applescripts to have equivalent shortcuts in Outliner/kGTD and elsewhere, but Mail doesn’t make it even a little bit easy to keyboard-navigate to any other folders than the standard Inbox/Outbox/Drafts/Sent/Junk.

Justin, You’ve actually addressed (and apparently solved) one of my major frustrations (filing/searching for e-mails relating to multiple projects.) Thanks. Do you tag outgoing mail this way as well?

Small point about, why not have one mailbox and smart folder everything. This is fine if you have a modest amount of email, but not when it’s your main communication mechanism.

I only keep smart folders for tracking flagged messages and recent work email. I stopped making smart folders for MailTag projects because well… on my little G4 1.25 powerbook, blowing through my email for a particular MailTag project each time I click the smart folder is well — slow. I’m not sold on smart folders, but clearly sold on MailActOn and MailTags2. I do use spotlight but only when searching not for day to day folder browsing. I’m willing to take the performance hit of spotlighting my email to save eyeballing the particular email I’m looking for, but all the time when I click on mail folders — I’ll pass.

I am very much on your side concerning folders. I abandoned them a while ago and made my life much easier. I suggest two changes to your scheme:

1. All mail that comes from mailinglists etc. is moved by rules to a subfolder “mailinglists”.

2. Instead of of having a separate “To respond” folder, mail that I have read and do not immediately respond simply stays in the Inbox. I usually have between zero and half a dozen mails of that kind in there.

A need to retrieve archived mails arises in very rare circumstances. In that case spotlight easily does the magic.

• Mike

RE: Dan

For me, the goal is to process the most I can, as quickly as I can, in the best context that I can.

So for me, to stay in my “Inbox” and go from message to message amking quick decisions about each one, what to do, why it is there and move along is the best.

At work, in Outlook, tons of folders b/c Outlook search stinks.

At home, in Mail, with great Smart Folders, spotlight and search, I figure why move things? Why not just leave them all where they are and just tag or flag them for clarity.

BZ

I gave up on filing in folders a long time ago. The amount of time expended doing this, and trying to determine in which folder an email should go, was always too frustrating. These days I’m a big tagging fan.

I’m with Merlin and many of the others.

I have 2 folders that are not my inbox. Reply To Archive

And, seeing how much I use “Reply To” it may not be long for this earth.

I use Mail Act-On and MailTags to tag emails that have a commonality. I find this much better than nested folders because messages can have more than one tag, and I can up with new tags as I need them.

I have dozens of smart folders though. One for each of the tags. I use lots of address book groups to round up all my emails from students.

One recent creation of shocking utility has been “Attach” folders. Essentially a smart folder that looks for: From: Someone/Somegroup, and Has Attachments. Every file my students have every sent me in one place.

For more details look into my blog. I plan a Mail rant sometime there soon.

I did an analysis of my email searching when I first started using GTD and again about 2 months ago after I got a new job. What I’ve found is that I almost always search for emails from a particular person rather than a category. My current folder/tag list (I’m a gmail user) is based around who emails are from: friends, family, work, writing, with a general info folder for reference stuff like passwords, flight info, etc. This really helps me to find emails quickly although half the time I still just search based on from:

I use folders but I’ve noticed that there are too many folders and most of the time I use the Search feature (in Yahoo or Gmail) to find the messages. The other thing is that when you have many folders, you start thinking about where stuff has to go or what folder to create and it hasn’t made things that much easier for me. That said, I’m leaning towards doing what Merlin has done but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

You know, Merlin. I asked myself the same question. Why would I want to use Msgfiler when I have Mail-Act-On? Its so much easier with the latter, for me anyway.

I am with Merlin on this one. I have

Inbox Waiting Current Archive

and then a sequence of older time based archives. I am an academic on a trimester system so every four months I start a new ‘Current Archive’ and move the previous to a dated archive system. This is mostly to keep the sizes of the individual archives down.

To keep current projects, grad students and so on straight I use tags and smart folders as needed.

My filing system is based primarily on who the e-mail is from. If I have a dozen clients, I can just go into one client’s folder and see everything for that particular client. Same with friends and family or different websites that regularly send me e-mail.

I don’t do any “manual” filing though, I just set up a rule and nevery worry about it again.