[Closed] Filer or Finder? What do you do with email?

More and more I rely on search. Whether that's good or bad is still open to debate, but it seems to be working

One massive inbox for me. Just had a huge clearout and still have 3-4000 emails in there. I can find everything I need with the search tool.

Whenever I've tried to use folders it's been a disaster. Unless you can definitely categorise everything (depends on your job, I'd say) then knowing where to look is a nightmare.

Searcher.

Can still find specific emails from my first project in 2009 so i think ill stick with it .

Helps that i tend to do one project at a time. I might file/set rules if i had multiple projects on the goif not just to make for an easy hand over dump.

I can't keep everything in my inbox as it would get filled up daily - work restrict the size of our mailboxes which prevents sending/receiving mails if it's full.

Emails either get binned, flagged for action if it can't be done straight way, or archived to client specific directory if I need it for reference.

Ideally I empty my inbox daily, but it isn't happening at the moment.

However I use the search function in Outlook extensively and quite often will extend the search to all folders rather than search in a specific folder.

Bit of both.

Our company puts a pretty low quota on mail storage also. I use folders/mailboxes in an attempt to organise stuff. It works for maybe 75% but it's hard to categorise some stuff. I have about 50 online folders and as projects or issues finish I move the related folders across to local ones on my work PC to try to minimise used space on the mail server.

I'm always losing stuff and find the search function in outlook is awful - ie can't find an email that I can see before running the search.

Manual searching vs automatic searching, gee, let me think...

I initially started creating folders for different customers when I started at my current job. I thought "right, this is it, I'm going to be organised this time. It probably lasted about six months before I saw my arse over it.

I quickly realised that maintaining an email filing system is a ballache to maintain (you wind up either manually moving every single email, or creating and constantly tweaking inbox rules); it adds complexity (is the email in your Inbox or a folder? Are you filing your Sent Items too, or are they all in one dirty great big heap outside of your filing system?); and crucially it [i]doesn't actually gain you anything.[/i]

I reckon that email filing is a throwback to when people had to file paper documents sensibly in order to ever find them again. These days I have a computer precisely so that I don't have to do tedious menial crap by hand any more.

I have a ridiculously small mailbox; 250Mb I think it is offhand. So I've got a permanently mounted .pst archive on my hard disk, and whenever I get the 'mailbox is getting full' email I copy my Inbox and Sent Items from the start of last month backwards out into the archive (so if I got the message now, I'd move everything from the 31st of October and earlier). Deleted Items get deleted on exit. Once I've added to the archive, I save a copy of it onto a network drive where it gets backed up as part of the corporate backup solution.

Search in early versions of Outlook was dire, but I'm using 2010 and it's pretty damn good these days. Hit Ctrl-E and type your search term, and away it goes. The Windows 7 search box on the Start menu searches emails automagically as well (do they use the same search engine, I wonder?)

Free yourself. Why bark when you've got a dog?

Quarterly pst file.
Created, exported & opened so I can drag & drop "sent" & "received" to it (& hence removing from Inbox quota) till end of the quarter.
Search works for me but I sometimes edit & add a key word to the subject if it's vague.

Everything in one folder. I do try to put receipts for work purchases in a folder for my accounts but its not a great system. For some things I forward them to myself with a few extra keywords.

In Outlook 2010 I use categories for all my projects/customers along with a modification of the getting things done (reference, complete, action, someday and waiting) so each email gets two tags the Project plus a GTD.

If its dealt with then it gets moved out of my inbox into a .PST file just the one per year that's then setup with smart search folders based on the Projects. Advantage of that is it indexes in the background so as soon as you click on a smart search item it filters instantly to that item, then if needed I can do the usual type of search but speeded up as its only a fraction of the .PST file.

Using some Quick Step buttons I can mark as read, add tags and move from my inbox to the PST file with one button click.

So in summary everything in one folder but tagged to enable quick filtered searches.

Cheers all....seems one big bucket with a few categories might work

A folder per customer. Small number of sub folders and search.

I mostly do this for archiving purposes as search tools are much better these days.

I still need to archive to a pst/local folder approx once every 6 months as our o365 setup auto-deletes after a certain number of mails/age.

I also archive sent mails.

Ctrl-A Del works quite well

Searcher, these days, now that the search tool in outlook is a bit better than it used to be.

Used to file a lot, but Cougar has it nailed, its a massive faff, and gets you nothing (well, not any more).

One of the great benefits of using google apps is having the power of google search both in your email system as well as google drive for your file management.

We still use folders in google drive, but they are shared folders for projects where everyone can dump all their relevant material. To extract the file I want, I just type some relevant words in the search bar and up it comes.

13 odd years ago a a previous employee they were trialling a file management system* for the company that was pretty much reliant on meta data tagging by users to help with automatically filing and retrieving documents. Such a dumb idea. These people were so idle they wouldnt get dressed in the morning if they thought no one was going to see them that day.

I think it was vaguely related to Microsoft sharepoint or something.

Thank god google came along and saved all the hassle.

Outlook 2010 - big bucket, use the search function.

I do try to delete crap, so the number of items isn't too bad - currently showing 25,776 received and 20,273 sent.

Auto-archiving here reduces folder size (which is made worse by large documents and PDFs).

If you have to use Outlook, categorisation also helps narrow down your searching for the important stuff (a sort of folder without a folder), search ges everything else quickly enough for me.

I do still have a bit of a folder structure, but what killed it for me was the default iOS mail client doesn't allow collapsible folders so my usual Wall of Manila wasn't going to work anymore.

For some reason unbeknownst to anyone I don't have the standard 500mb limit imposed on my mailbox, so I'm definitely a finder. Go through flurries of filing, but get so many bloody emails that I can't keep on top of it (particularly if I'm out of the office and replying on BlackBerry), so half the time you've only filed some of the relevant mails on a topic and it's harder to find than just having everything in the Inbox, as parts of a thread are missing!

Edit: just checked, I have 4,739 emails in my inbox (auto archive after 3 months), and a further 16,834 in my archived inbox.