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How i organize my email

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mouser:
I thought it might be interesting to share some tips+tricks we've learned on how to organize our email folders.

I use TheBat and one of the first things i do when i create a new email account is create a bunch of additional inbox folders.

Then i create a filter so that any incoming email from someone i know (in my address book) gets sent to the "Inbox - Known" folder.  This helps me identify most of the email that is good.

All other email is filed in "Inbox - To Be Filed"

Then i make a folder called "Inbox - To Reply" where i can move email that needs a reply from me at some point but which i don't answer right away.

I also create 2 top level folders, one for Spam and one for Mailing Lists.  I have filters that send any email from a mailing list directly into the Mailing List folder where I ignore it most of the time (my filters also mark it as read so it doesn't distract me). The Mailing List folder has a subfolder called "Read" where I move mail every once and a while after I've glanced at it.   Because mailing lists never appear in my normal email inbox to distract me i don't worry about signing up to mailing lists much.

The Incoming Spam mailbox is where spam lives.  I actually have subfolders for "Confirmed Spam" which is where i myself personally put spam.  The top level is where my filters put it.  The reason i do this instead of just deleting spam email is to give myself several chances to go back and look for stuff that might have been mistakenly marked as spam, and to give myself time to see patterns in spam that i might want to add to a filter to help me flag spam.

Picture below [note screenshot captor makes it easy to blur stuff with the blur button :) ]
What tricks do you use?

m_s:
Like you, Mouser, I use several folders, but I work in a different way, without the automation you use.  I'm going to see if there is a way I could automate more, but I doubt it because I really need to read everything as it comes in.  I also use The Bat! (bit of a Bat evangelist, actually! Every day I can be heard calling out, 'Dang!  It's so good!' as I discover another useful feature).  I don't bother filtering spam anymore, because I get very little of it since switching to gmail (although I do have to go online everyday to check the spam folder in case it's caught things that aren't spam - maybe one message per day).  I treat the Inbox folder as a pool into which all new mail enters, and then I separate it into various subfolders in the Inbox.  My boss doesn't read email as email, so I periodically Save all the messages in each folder as a text document, then run a few macros in Word to produce formatted pages for him to read.  Once I have printed the pages, I move the messages from their Inbox sub-folders to subfolders with the same names under Mail Folders, so that I can find them easily. (Must say that lately I have just used Archivarius to find things by keyword, so I don't really bother looking for them in those folders anymore - but I will likely continue to use them for ease of ordering.)  I keep each year's Mail Folders separately, so I have a structure of '2004/Mail Folders/[sub folders as in Inbox]', etc.  (I really don't need that Mail Folders, do I - I think it just came that way when I imported from Outlook.)  Again, the advent of Archivarius might change how I do this in future, but I might just stick to what I've done so far.

mouser:
its a good idea to keep archives by year, i might start doing that.

kfitting:
Once I started using Opera's email.... good bye manual organization!  Opera's folders are merely database filters in disguise.  There is no more moving mail around.  Just make a filter and Opera takes care of the rest.  Though I havent done it, you can also have Opera make up a filter as you drag messages into it.  No need to worry if making a new rule should copy or move the message because the message is not copied or moved!  Thus, you can make rules without cluttering up your harddrive (with redundant messages) or yanking a message out of a current folder and (notice the boolean logic here!) you can tell the same email to be shown in as many filters as you wish.  I come to work and try to use Outlook (no choice.... silly government)  and cant stand having to make all these arcane rules just to manage my email.  I will admit, Opera lacks a few features I would like, such as formatted emails (maybe I just dont know how to use it properly, but I cant find this feature), but the low organization requirement is so nice.  Mark an email as read... and you're done!

Kevin

Carol Haynes:
I am probably a heretic on this forum but I use Microsoft Outlook XP for email, diary etc. and find it very useful.

[selling mode]
One area it isn't so excellent in though is organising incoming mail - enter the magic formula ...

I use a combination of filters (for predicatable email) and POPfile to 'intelligently' sort less predicatble mail based on content. To use POPfile I use the excellent OutClass addin for Outlook which gives a one click classification toolbar.

It takes a little while for POPfile to get to know what you mean (it uses Bayesian filtering methods but doesn't come with any preconceived ideas) but when it gets to know you it is astonishingly accurate. A lot of people see POPfile as a Spam filter (and it does that better than any commercial product I have ever seen) but it is so much more than that.

This means I can have all my emails sorted automatically into suitable folders and I use Outlook's Folder Bar to display all the folders I am regularly interested in so that I can instantly see when new messages arrive.

I also use Outlook's automatic archive feature and free backup addin to automate backups of the main files and archive regularly. At the end of the year I simply rename the archive file to include a year in its name and next archive a new file is automatically created.

Recently I added an extra layer to this byt switching to Yahoo mail as my standard email interface. All the stuff I like to read arrives there (and is filtered there). Anything that doesn't need to be kept (a lot of newsletters/sales bumpf fall into this category) gets deleted before being downloaded onto my system. Things to keep temporarily (like ongoing email conversations) are filed there until they are finished. Anytjing for permanent keeping (receipts, subscriptions etc.) are left in the Inbox and 'POPPED' into Outlook for safe keeping and archiving. I hadn't bothered with Yahoo mail much (even though I had a number of accounts) until I changed ISP, at which point I was given a preimum account. I have to say it works really quite well and the filters in there seem to learn reasonably well.

This setup really allows me to read what I want when/where I want, encourages me to read'n'dump (and not archive) short term email correspondence and automatically filters/sorts/backup/archive other stuff.

Plus I have a built in Task Manager/Contacts/Diary etc. and even a Journal (at least for Office Documents - it seems a bit shonky for other types).
[/selling mode]

Am I missing something?

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