43 Folders

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Archiving emails - what do you do?

For the longest time I have been the mad professor of email folders, with tons of separate folders organized by subject (particular clients, administrivia, personal, etc.). I have been fairly religious about keeping my inbox empty and use a fairly rigorous system of filters and popfile to tag, categorize, and redirect incoming email into the proper folder.

I've been looking at Merlin's three-folder system as well as Gina Trapani's Trusted Trio action-based system and they make a lot of sense to me.

But one flaw with these systems is they don't account for long-term storage of emails after they've passed through the Action|Hold|Archive process.

So, how do you handle the archiving of email? I run Mac OS X and while spotlight does a pretty good job of finding email, I would assume that at some point having some kind of folder hierarchy is still necessary. Or is it?

Craig's picture

From the inbox, my emails...

From the inbox, my emails go into one of three places:
- if I will never need to see it again, into the trash (obviously)
- if I can imagine needing to see it again for a current project but not forever, into the Short-term Archive folder
- if I can imagine needing to see it again indefinitely, into the Archive folder

I abandoned categorizing my archived mails a while back and I am VERY happy that I did. The search engines at my disposal can find anything I need no matter where it's saved. I tried "tagging" solutions as an interim measure, but I decided even that was overkill, as I've never not been able to find an email I was looking for just using search.

The Short-term Archive folder is for things like emails proposing times for a meeting: until that meeting date is set, I should hang onto the message, but I certainly don't need it permanently. The theory is that I can delete the oldest messages in the STA (say, six months old and older) at any point and be fine.

My Archive folder is actually "Archive (current yr)," and I have older archive folders for previous years, just to make browsing them a little snappier. Of course searches go across all folders.

I'm using OSX Mail, and Mail Act-on to file messages with a keypress.

Hope this helps.

 
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