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How do you manage your email?

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Ehtyar:
I prefer the single inbox idea actually. I can't really see the point of multiple inboxes; I can see which account the email went to. Thunderbird will, however, allow you to specify a folder in which to place email from each individual account.
I wouldn't use The Bat! as it's closed source, Thunderbird is open source, and provides excellent extensions, including GPG/PGP support.
[shameless plug]Thunderbird 3b1 out soon[/url][/shameless plug]

Ehtyar.

Darwin:
Sorry about introducing the S*** topic  :-[ It was meant as an aside (and I should have labelled it as such).

Anyway, I organize the e-mail from my 8 e-mail addresses first into folders by subject/category and then into folders by e-mail account. I have rules that do this for me. Note, though, that Outlook applies the rules in order (and of course, as far as I can tell, won't let you rearrange the order that the rules are applied in  >:() so I have all of my "category" rules set to run before my E-mail account specific rules. Thus, I might get an e-mail to my Yahoo! account that relates to UltraEdit and another that is from a friend. The "UltraEdit" rule moves the Ultraedit mail to my Ultraedit folder (which is a subfolder of my "Software" folder) but leaves the e-mail from my friend. Outlook goes through the rest of the rules and when it gets to "Yahoo" moves my friend's e-mail into my Yahoo folder.

I use EZDetach to get rid of large attachments and thus have stopped archiving my messages. I"m going to go back to doing so, though. NB DetachPipe is probably a better choice for detaching attachments but I found that out AFTER I bougth a licence for EZDetach. The one feature that makes DetachPipe more attractive to me is its ability to remove an attachment and recognize it, so that the next time the same attachment is "seen" it is simply deleted and a link to the previously saved attachment is inserted into the e-mail. EZDetach simply renames the duplicate attachemts resulting in much larger archives. I've written to the developer to request the DetachPipe solution be adopted but nothing has happened so far (though I did get a response indicating that it was "going on the list"). Otherwise, EZDetach is brilliant. I opted for it over DetachPipe initially because of licensing policy differences...

Not sure what else to include here, but will add more as it occurs to me...

Darwin:
Just to clarify, my inbox is organized into Folders by e-mail address for "general" e-mail (like the imaginary one from my imaginary friend above) and into specific folders for different categories. Thus, I have a folder called Software that contains subfolders for receipts, registration keys, newsletters and so on. Any relevant e-mail gets shunted in here (wherever it belongs) regardless of what e-mail account it is received through... Whatever is left over in the Inbox after the "specific" rules have run gets shifted to the e-mail specific folders at the end of the rule filtering "cycle".

What can I say? It works and I am comfortable with it. It's pretty simplistic, though!

dspelley:
I use Outlook 2007 both at home and work, but the way I handle my email at each location is very different.

I work for a fairly large company (4300+ employees) and there are policies and procedures put in place by our IT department (at the direction of our Legal department) that dictate how our email is handled. Each week, email in our Inbox and Sent folders that are older than about 2 months are purged and moved to a temporary trash can. We can retrieve those messages during the next week, but then they are gone. Email that we have filed into folders (either by moving it there or by the use of rules) is similary purged if it is older than 18 months. Same deal applies - we can retrieve it during the following week, and then it's gone.

The whole process is built around corporate document retention policies that take into account what can be considered "corporate records". Implicit in the policy are considerations about legal "discovery" procedures, etc. We are unable to archive email, move it into folders outside of Outlook, etc.

I do move email into folders according to projects, or topics, or by organization. I manage an R&D program and do a lot of projects with universities, national labs, consultants, etc. I do use some rules (for newsletters and other regular bulk mail), but for the most part I manually move email into folders. I also make pretty regular use of Outlooks ability to convert email into calendar appointments and tasks.

One product I have used for several years that I have found very useful is Nelson Email Organizer (NEO)  http://www.caelo.com/index.php
Makes it easy to see email from a particular sender (no matter what folder it's in), see all attachments, find by date, etc. Also has some easy ways to make rules.

At home I use a similar process, but use a lot more rules. I also don't have to worry about how long I keepstuff. We get a lot of email related our kids' school, shopping, banking and investments, books, newsletters, etc - so most of that stuff is handled by rules. With earlier versions of Outlook I used a spam filter (using whitelists) called Qurb. http://www.qurb.com/ It looks like they were bought by CA.

Paul Keith:
http://www.43folders.com/izero

Inbox zero is a good base to start with if you haven't heard of it.

I haven't been doing this but I'm sure I can make it work. (I'm currently dealing with my bookmark problem)

Set a review schedule of your own choice. The longer the time, the longer the review time.

Ex.

If you review your e-mails once a week, then set a day per week to organize everything.

A month? Then set a week.

A year? Then set a month and so on and so forth.

Basically on this review day, make it a priority to remove every e-mail in your inbox to another section be it a tag or a folder. Skim it only. Don't read it thoroughly, click on any external links or attachment or reply to any e-mail.

Since you're doing this, you want a folder where it's e-mails you urgently want to reply to.

An even better section if you have tons of this is to have a section for the e-mails you want to reply to and the e-mails you need to reply to but only make this for urgent e-mails. You'll see why later on.

So you've emptied your inbox. Now every review time, do this. It should be easier because you have less e-mails.

Now here's where the different categories help. Because each e-mails are separated into each categories, you can now get yourself into a reading groove without jumping from topic to topic. This means those tons of e-mails you have is now no different than a webpage you haven't read. Sure, it's still needs to be read but now it has one theme so now you can read it at your own pace without feeling pressured. It's like a book only in e-mail format. It also means you'd get to read more e-mails because you know what to expect and you are interested within that reading time frame.

Now with the exception of the urgent e-mails, switch the date of the entries to oldest first. This makes it more interesting to you because you don't feel like you're reading through old stuff the more you get through. Every item you are reading in that category is getting newer and newer so there's more incentive for you to get to the end of your e-mails and it doesn't feel like you're just cleaning up on old stuff.

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