Restructure of my email system
A couple of days ago I did a massive restructure of my email system. The old system was based on folders and folders nested in folders which was efficient once the emails were filed but the problem is that it took too much mental energy to do so constantly. So what happened is that a lot of mail didn’t get filed so the folder system was only partly functional, in other words partly disfunctional.
The new system is much much flatter. Basically there are two main folders, one Received and one Sent. I don’t organise them at all but rely on Thunderbird (or Mail.app) intelligent saved searches to create virtual folders. I only have a few permanent virtual folders (like Received in the past month) and others are created as needed. Plus points are no more mental effort on filing, messages can exist in more than one virtual folder and a cleaner inbox. The only problem is that because I use IMAP the searches can be slow. Not horrendously slow but definitely not instantenous.
I’ll try to report back in a few months as to if it is better in the long run.
I went through this excersize about 2 years ago and haven’t looked back since!
With my office e-mail I received between 50 to 60 per day. Using Lotus Notes gave me a rather powerful search engine to use and I found after a while I only used three folders – Inbox, Filed and Sent. I liked to be able to keep a clean inbox – If I’d read a mail and dealt with it, it went to Filed. Sent maintained itself – If my Inbox had more than 20 messages, I needed to take a morning off and clear it.
Lotus Notes had the neat ability to “View All” mails, which is pretty much which lead me to stop using folders ’cause I always used “View All” and searched through that.
I tried this with my POP/IMAP mail, For personal, but didn’t find a solution ’till Gmail – I now do a two step approach. I have a GMail account, and every 5 minutes download all mails to my IMAP server, from where I read it with various clients using IMAP (mobile phone, Thunderbird on Linux, Thunderbird on Windows, Webmail clients on the server, etc).
Initially I did this ’cause gmail had the best SPAM filter, but it also serves as a backup of all my mails, and when I’m really searching for something (can’t remember when it was, or who sent it) I simply search through my archives in Gmail – Up to 800MB of mails in there already. The more I use it, the more helpful it’s become.
Just my 2 cents worth …
Yours
Roy
Thanks, sounds like you have got your system pretty well figured out. I’m still trying for a pure IMAP system, even though I have a gmail account. I use popfile for spam filtering which beats Thunderbird’s hopelessly inadequate spam filter easily.
I’ve forwarded your comment to Rie who also wants to tame her Lotus Notes account at work.