I’ve been advocating an email organization system using a single archive for a while now, so it’s nice to see others picking up on the idea and adding some very useful smart mailboxes. I’m particularly fond of using Mail.app to tag messages and then using Mail Tags to find things like receipts and other important emails quickly and easily.

i just yesterday deleted all mail (archive a. sent) pre 2006

I use IMAP and I prefer to keep my email on the server side. This makes things a little tricky for using one Archive folder. I have an Archive folder on each of my IMAP servers. Then, I use one Smart Mailbox in Mail.app to aggregate them. It has as many criteria as I have IMAP accounts. It is set to match any of the conditions and each condition is “In Archive” where Archive is the Archive folder from each account.

If you have trouble selecting folders in the Smart Mailbox dialog, here’s a tip. Expand your IMAP folder list before you create the Smart Mailbox and those nested folders will be available in the Smart Mailbox dialog.

Other than that, plain ol’ search can usually get me what I’m after. If not, then I limit it to a particular account’s Archive folder and research. Never failed me yet. {Knocking wood.}

@Jeremiah Fyffe I don’t want to derail the topic here, but I wrote about my system for doing this on my blog a while back. Here’s a link.

The problem I have with archiving is message that I know I’ll only need for a little while. I’d love to have a way to mark message to “expire” after so-many days before putting them in the archive. I can refer to the message before then if needed, and otherwise it just goes away. Does anyone know of a way to achieve this with Mail.app?

I found that the “one big archive” system has worked well for since I moved to using Gmail as my mail backend. I use the after: operator a lot for searching, after:oneweekago gets me a nice short list of recent messages. Since I’ve become a convert to the delete rather than keep mindset, my list of archived items for each week is getting smaller and smaller as I lose my fear of deleting messages. I was tagging stuff for a while but I’ve given up on that as well. I only tag receipts now since some of them dont have good keywords to search on and I may need to pull up ALL receipts for every purchase for accounting purposes.

I also uploaded a few years worth of mail, that had been in a overly complex system of folders and dumped it all in the Gmail archive. Searches are still very fast and I’ve never had an issue retrieving anything I needed.

Great article. One thing that I had a little trouble with is Number 3. Smart Mailbox: Address Book Groups.

Maybe I was thick, but adding that was not obvious. How I did it: Mailbox->New Smart Mailbox, then choose “Sender is a Member of a Group”, and then pick the group you had previously created in Address Book.

Thanks again for the tips.

I very new to this whole GTD, inbox zero and all the associated stuff. I’m also not a mac expert, only had mine for about a year. So if I am miss understanding something please let me know. With that said, I have a question for you.

If you create only smart mailboxes, won’t all your email still be in inbox thus negating the Inbox Zero idea?

As I understand it, smart mailboxes, don’t actually move anything they just link to it. So either you’d have to manually move them into an archive folder or maybe it’s possible to make a rule that all read messages are moved to archive folder.

I currently use rules to move my messages to folder when I receive them. How is this any better or worse than smart mailboxes?

Thanks, and please forgive any ignorance.

Beautiful! I’ve been working on putting this together for myself for a while. You have given me some great tips to streamline the process.

The question remains … why email only? Why not put spotlight tags to use and go smart mailboxes only for files as well. It seems that there are some real hurdles in the way, but maybe we need to start to name these and see if there is some third-party stuff that can address it an get our files smart as well.

What would it look like to have a program like pathfinder that was completely based on tags, creator names, creation dates, modify dates, etc rather than what folder the stinking thing is in and a bunch of aliases to allow the item to be in multiple folders.

Thank you Merlin … you’re a wizard making a bunch of silly Arthurs king!

Alright. I listened to your inbox zero talk on my walk to work this morning and then read this on break. I give in. I am starting a single archive folder in Mail, and I will no longer sort my mails by project. I am setting up a reminder a month from now, to see how it went. If I hate it I can always resort that one month of archive. And if I love it, well I guess I win then. Thanks for the tough love, coach.

I totally agree, I have not moved a mail message manually in over a year. I use a desktop search tool called X1, that allows me to create smart searches for project data, date ranges, or by a combination of factors and save the search. The great thing about it is the time from search - select - act on mail, files or even contacts has saved me a hour a week, easily.

Jeremiah, I use Default Folder X to tag the files since using Get Info window is too slow. I’ve also created a Smart Folder, which searches only the Spotlight comments field. The folder resides in the Finder window Sidebar for easy access. The Smart Folder defaults to searching some arbitrary phrase, but I just click Edit and enter the phrase/tag I want to find. This way I get to see only the files that have my search phrase in the Spotlight comments, not in the name or in the file contents. Not a perfect solution, works for me.

great post. i do it exactly like this. i got 2 accounts in mail.app with separated archive folders which i combine with a smart folder. for the fast archiving i use MailActOn. In MailActOn i have created two rules with the same shortcut, they only differ in there condition and sort only the mail from one account to the according archive folder.

This is essentially how I work with Gmail. A few month ago they added the ability to apply a new filter to all existing messages, so it’s basically just like Smart Mailboxes: all current email that matches the search will get filtered immediately by label or what have you, and all future email will get handled the same way as well.

The only extra bit of futzing is that, once you’re finished with a particular temporary label, you have to separately delete both the label and the corresponding filter. There’s also no built-in way to call up saved searches by date, but Mihai Parparita created a script for Greasemonkey that does just that. I don’t use that script myself, though, because I use several computers from day to day and I don’t want to have to install it (and maintain the saved search list, since it’s set with a local browser cookie) on each one individually.

Merliniscious goodness

I have combined all my email by year. I can search just this year pretty quickly but have the others around if needed. Mail.app and huge IMAP archives can be pretty slow but this seems to work ok.

For those who asked, Merlin is talking about an archive, somewhere you store stuff after you read it NOT “it is ok to leave your inbox stuffed if you use smart mailboxes”

Related: I recently did something similar for my mailing lists

All my Mac related mailing lists go to one Mac folder. Do I really need two separate lists for BBedit and another for Yojimbo and another for Launchbar etc? No.

If one list is high volume enough to get a lot of messages per day I might leave it apart but for now this is much simpler.

I’ve had one big fat Archive folder in Mail.app for more than a year now (along with Action and Hold folders, but that’s it).

The only challenge I’ve found was completing my last tax return, when I had to fish through the archive for every message with ‘receipt’ or ‘invoice’ in it, which took ages.

In that light, my one proviso would be to have a ‘reciepts/invoices’ subfolder as part of your archive.

The Acceptable Exception…there definitely is some merit to not having that “single, bajillion-item mailbox.” Read up here: Overstuffed mailbox is unexpectedly empty

Keep an eye on those mailbox sizes folks.

Thanks for the clarity. Appreciated.

As you say, my mileage varies… What I’d really like is a literal archive file of all 2006 messages (received/sent) that can be indexed and searched independent of my 2007 working bucket of bits. Same for 2005, 2004 and so on. For some it might be by month or by topic or whatever… I simply need a smaller Mail.app file for my mailbox. It’s getting unwieldy and it’s been a lifesaver having the stuff so easily accessible. CYA type stuff if you hadn’t guessed.

I think this is great. For the first time in my life today i got my mailbox to 0. What i don’t get is when you create smart mailboxes, they are like an alias file, so they still live in your inbox, correct? So how do you get your inbox to 0 everyday if these hang around for a week or so.? Am i missing something?

I agree with Jeremiah in suggesting it’s not only appropriate to apply this system to mail, but to also extend it beyond into all data.

It does take a leap of faith though. One piece of software that has helped me take this leap to some extent is Yep:

http://www.yepthat.com/

Unfortunately it only handles PDFs, but it’s ease of tagging, good use of previews, and the flexibility it offers for getting data in makes it really compelling to use (and even to pay for!).

There are other packages I’ve seen that apply the same idea to a broader range of documents, but they’re just not as usable. Another nice thing about Yep is that it uses normal directories to store the PDFs in, so you don’t need to worry about arcane databases that you can’t access in the future.

This is clearly where the OS makers want us to head to, but it’s a big change for most people. When there are still thousands of people out there with hard drives full of Word documents named “Untitled document 1”, “Untitled document 2”, etc, then convincing people to use metadata is pretty tough. It needs good interface design to make this a natural habit. I think that’s where software like Yep (and maybe also web sites like Flickr) come in.

I think when you are actively working on a project (a complex document, for example) it is useful to have your working files all in a single place, but beyond that, tagging and searching really is the future. For now.

My entire history in e-mail is one of bloated, unsorted inboxes. Recently I’ve gotten it down to two regular folders, two permanent smart folders, and a couple of ad hoc smart folders depending on what I’m working on. I use a homemade tagging system taking advantage of the “redirect” command. The workflow goes like this: message comes in, if it’s trash, then it goes in the trash; if I can answer it quickly, I do so. If it’s part of a conversation with friend or family, it goes into the “Correspondence” folder. If it’s something I need to keep either for posterity or because there’s an action yet to be done attached to it, I redirect it to myself. In the subject line, I add a tag at the beginning prepended with “&” and if there’s an action associated, add a flag. When the redirected mail comes back to me, a mail rule uses the “&” to sort it directly into the “tagged mail” folder. Then I can make a smart folder for any current projects, or search for reference mails by the tag. The great thing about redirecting is that it generates a new “unread” mail that shows up in the message count associated with each folder. The two permanent smart folders are “actions” which of course are all flagged, and “weed” which catches anything older than a certain date, so I can decide whether it should be chucked or archived off-line.

And Jeremiah, as a matter of fact, Path Finder + Hazel + Spotlight tags is pretty powerful. My “downloads” and “journal articles” folders, once bloated just like my inbox, have been similarly tamed using this combo.

Great post! I took your advice to try the “Recently Sent” smart mailbox and that has worked very well for me. I prefer to treat Mail.app more like an Inbox where I process and get things out that I need to do. It’s that residual fear from my Quarterdeck mail days when I got stuck with thousands of archived emails in an obsolete program that makes me trust keeping things in an email program less. So I prefer to get everything out to the file system as often as possible.

Emails also tend to come with more than one task I need to do as well as with peripheral information that is a waste of time to re-read again the next time I see the email. So my preference is to use the “select-option-drag” technique to make clippings of each of the tasks in an email and drag them to an “Inbox” folder I’ve created on my desktop. This allows me to treat each task one at-a-time and allows me to then delete the email which no longer has anything else I need. It’s my way of “gutting” my emails for actionable content so I can focus on only what I need to when I need to.

Ok. Maybe you Mail.app guys can help me… Merlin seems to use Mail.app on his mac.. so I am thinking I am missing a key setting or configuration area… I have recent converted back to the Mac platform (I had a Mac 128k, back in THE DAY), and I tried to use Mail.app…. BUT… I can’t tolerate (maybe it is just me) the behaviour when deleting an item from the inbox.

It doesn’t seem to take you to the next unread item, but instead changes focus to the previously read message.

what am I missing? With this crazy and un-useful behavior, all the smart-mailbox-fu in the world won’t help me, becuase I won’t be able to use Mail.app. It just makes processing the stuff in IN too time consuming.. I want to be able to hit DEL and then have the focus in IN move to the next unread message and not back to the previous messagee…

Merlin.. maybe you could record a 30 second screen-cast of you processing IN in Mail.app so I can see WTF I am missing here.

:)

Thanks for the reminder about Address Book groups - been meaning to do that for ages.

As for e-mail archiving, I’m now leaning towards turning old e-mail into PDFs for safe keeping. I use a smart mailbox to find old e-mail, skim for any important attachments (which there rarely are!) and deal with those manually, then select all the messages, print them as PDFs, delete the originals, throw the PDFs into a folder somewhere, and know that I can use Spotlight to find whatever I need.

Keeps mail.app nice and empty so I can just focus on “recent noise”.

I switched to this practice back when Merlin first talked about “inbox zero” and never looked back. Mailtags is great, and the integration with iGTD is superb for getting the actions out but keeping the link to the actual email.

As to archiving, I do it at the beginning of every summer. To keep the search functionality of all your archive, I heartily suggest DEVONthink Pro Office. Its searching functionality is excellent, and it keeps all of the attachments and everything. Really excellent stuff. The one thing I’m hoping for is for DT to keep the MailTag keywords and notes.

My wife gets stressed out by the inherent e-mail property of needing to reply to everything right now. After three or four e-mails in the same day to the same person (always some variation of telling them exactly what to do), my wife is ready to hit the ceiling.

So she developed a “Tomorrow” mailbox. Any reply today to an e-mail sent today gets put in the tomorrow box - a built in one day waiting period. She only ever have to interact with people once a day unless some project really, really needs instant gratification.

The emotional difference is noticeable. She’s relaxed and happy about her projects. All sorts of things are getting done without her micromanaging them. Better yet, everything still gets done and I get a happy wife!

I started running into trouble keeping all of my archive in one big IMAP mailbox, so I came up with an AppleScript to automatically create a new mailbox based on the received date of the message. Each month, it creates a new archive folder, but I never have to think about it. I use MailActOn to bind Ctrl-S to run the script, and my messages are archived away automatically. Smart Folders based on MailTags, date ranges, or simple search terms help me find what I’m looking for later. If you want to try the script, check out http://www.doughellmann.com/projects/MailArchiveByDate/.

I’m all new to GTD and looking at every possible way to clear the old noggin. This thread will certainly get priority…as soon as I get from Panther to Tiger. In fact, this might be the impetus to do just that! [And Merlin, please come back to MacBreak Weekly ASAP, only one episode without you and I already find myself missing your wicked wit! Justine is sweet, though.]

Personally, I found that smart folders are a little too slow compared with regular folders, given my email packrat ways these days. And with mail act-on, tagging is no easier than foldering. I have reduced my hierarchy a bit, though based on ideas like this one….

For most purposes I found that using “Search folder” feature in Outlook does the job fine. I can keep all email in only 2 basic folders (Inbox, Archive), and can use Search Folders to display the emails I need. Some search folders I have are “Unanswered email”, “Today’s email”, “Boss’ email” etc.