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?

direwolf's picture

Does Gmail gaurentee the copy...

enine wrote:
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.

Well, it sells itself on the fact that you 'never have to delete any mail' so I'm *presuming* it's there for the long haul.

Thing is, I tend to chop & change email clients sometimes & also use Windows, so I have more faith that my mail will be safer in Gmail than on my hard drive :)

 
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