43 Folders

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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

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?

enine's picture

I route all my email...

direwolf wrote:
I route all my email via Gmail, which means [a] it gets spam cleaned & [b] a copy stays in Gmail & is infinitely easier to find than using Windows search tools.

Does Gmail gaurentee the copy stays there. Years ago I used MSN/Hotmail and one day all my mail was gone and never returned. Thats when I started keeping it locally.

 
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