Getting Over Archiving, by Jeffrey Veen

Getting Over Archiving

There have been some very good posts from Merlin over at 43Folders recently on the topic of email management -- a skill you cannot avoid these days regardless of your profession. You can read them here, here, and here.

Late last year, as I prepared for taking a rare and coveted chunk of time off of work, I realized that I was sitting on an inbox with nearly 2000 messages, six hundred unread. I had lost control of correspondence. I didn't know what was in there. I didn't want to find out.

Eventually, after three solid days of nothing but inbox triage, I had my inbox empty. Ten minutes later, a dozen new messages showed up. I knew I had to develop some combination of habits and tools that would help me keep my head above water.

One trick came in the form of an Applescript that moves messages to an archival mailbox by using a command key. I can't believe how much easier that simple shortcut made processing my inbox -- saves me soooo much time. I've assigned two keys (^a for "Archive" and ^s for "missed spam"). Once an hour, I do a first-pass of my inbox, shooting things into the right place without moving my hands or deciding anything more than "Keep or do later?"

Thus, I gave up on any sort of structured archiving (in direct contradiction to my RSS-reading strategy, I realize). Before I had dozens of folders for people/projects/themes, etc. etc. Blech. Now, I've got a folder with thousands of messages that I rotate once a year or so. Even with mail.app's pathetic search capabilities, I can find stuff easily enough. Spotlight, I'm guessing, will make it trivial.

The bigger point here, of course, is that people who think for a living are relying more and more on search rather than browse -- and eventually personal social networks -- to manage the overwhelmingly complex amount of data that they need to transform daily into information, and ultimately understanding.

What tools do you use?

This entry was written by Jeffrey Veen and posted 18 February 2005 at 9:18 AM. It was filed under Personal, Technology. | View blog reactions

Comments

1. On 18 February 2005 at 9:25 AM Matt wrote:

I have about one @ACTION folder that is my todo, 8 folders for friends, family, and current projects, and another 18 or so for different WordPress things, and that's all that lives on my main account.

On my backup/archival server I keep all my old mail in giant folders, one for each year, and I loaded it into a MySQL database and search it using SQL commands when I'm looking for something.

I would love to have a shortcut key for filing messages in Thunderbird, I'll have to investigate that.

2. On 18 February 2005 at 9:40 AM richard wrote:

Right now my inbox has 12 messages in it, and rarely gets above 30. I use my inbox as my to do list, so I file everything as soon as I've replied or taken action. Filters handle all the mailing lists, like NYT headlines, weekly airline fare deals, and Aquarius Records' new releases. Everything else gets filed into either personal folders by person, or work folders by client. People or clients I haven't talked to in over a year get deleted every quarter or so.

3. On 18 February 2005 at 9:56 AM Jeremy Flint wrote:

I think my biggest problem is that I have 3 inboxes.

I have my work e-mail, which over the past year I have been able to reduce to nothing but work related messages and spam. Occasionally an old friend will fire off a personal e-mail to my work address, but that is rare.

I have my domain e-mail, which actually doesn't get any e-mail sent to me through my site. It is mostly for my online billing statements and notifications, and some personal messages.

Lastly, I have my Gmail account, which I use for mailing lists, e-mails via the contact form on my site, notices about comments being posted on my site, and stuff like that. It also has the occasional personal message in it.

As far as archiving, I have labels on my Gmail account for sorting messages. No real archiving going on with that account. For my other two accounts, I just use folders.

On my work account, every few weeks I will go in and move all messages older than a month (unless they pertain to a current project) to an archive folder for the co-worker that sent it to me.

4. On 18 February 2005 at 10:05 AM Merlin wrote:

Nice one, Jeff.

I was talking to a friend yesterday about that word "triage" and how it comes from, literally, evaluating a medical crunch where there's very limited resources. Three choices:

1. Goners you don't want to waste resources on
2. More minor cases that can wait for now
3. People who can and should be helped most _right now_

Sounds a lot like

1. Delete
2. Defer
3. Do

I, too, love and swear by Aaron's scripts, btw.

5. On 18 February 2005 at 10:35 AM Jeff Perrin wrote:

I haven't been able to work without virtual/search folders in my e-mail client for over a year now. First with Evolution, then Outlook 2003 and Thunderbird. It's a must-have feature for me.

6. On 18 February 2005 at 10:52 AM anders wrote:

mutt + procmail + gmail.

procmail filters everything from mailing lists into the appropriate folders. one recipe forwards a copy of every email to a gmail account for archiving and searching.

i have the GTD style 'action' and 'waiting' folders. mutt's sweet keyboard shortcuts (and customizability) make processing my INBOX easy. start at the top. for each email, if it isn't actionable, 'd' deletes it or 's' saves it to a folder ('save-hook's in my .muttrc make most messages go to the right place without any extra keystrokes). if it is actionable and takes less than 2 minutes, it's done immediately. otherwise, it goes into 'action' or 'waiting'. i have a policy of never closing mutt with anything left in the INBOX.

7. On 18 February 2005 at 12:09 PM Jason Beaird wrote:

At work I pretty much have DO IT NOW emails, inter-office email, or Spam in my inbox. I have SpamBayes (http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/) well trained to get rid of 98% of my spam and inter-office stuff either gets replied to or tossed into an internal folder. The DO NOW stuff stays in the inbox till I get it done at which time it gets filtered into a client's folder.

All of my various personal emails trickle over to my gmail account. I have a ton of folders that I move emails into on my gmail account, and I have a few filters setup to make some regular low-priority emails (like blog activity, newsletters, etc.) skip the inbox and go unread into their folders. Whenever a folder has unread messages in gmail, it's name shows up bold with the number of unread messages next to it.

8. On 18 February 2005 at 1:44 PM David Kemper wrote:

An interesting and very timely post, Jeff, especially considering the line of work I am in.

I am an electronic records archivist at McGill University, and email management has become a hot topic on campus ever since the university deemed email correspondence an official form of communication. As a result, the University Archives must manage--i.e. organize, archive and preserve for business reasons and posterity those emails that reflect university business. We're working with the university's IT sector, hoping to come up with some solutions to achieve our records management objectives (so far an enterprise-wide electronic records/document management system seems like a possible answer).

We haven't found any software tools to solve the overflowing inbox crisis or the unorganized email folder problems, though. The users we interviewed--administrative staff, professors, etc--create and store their emails in folder structures that *they* find useful. And some of them use Google Desktop to find emails. But how can records managers and archivists collect the emails of institutional value from these huge congested inboxes?!

Our "digitalpermanence" project has more information, including email best practices http://www.archives.mcgill.ca/dp/. Feel free to visit!

9. On 18 February 2005 at 3:27 PM neil wrote:

I'm pretty much a hardcore filer. I use POPFile to classify stuff into around a dozen high level categories (personal, client, server, mailing list, software, subscription, etc.) and then use Mail.app's internal filters to channel those into specific mailboxes (Webdesign-l, ClientX, Barebones, etc.).

I set this system up about a year and a half ago and it's worked quite well. I tend to keep nearly all of the email I generate or receive that's important (i.e. not a mailing list post, email subscription, or other notification) so organizing everything when it arrives is much faster than doing that after I've read it.

POPFile is really what makes this easy. I needed to train it to recognize spam, so why not train it to also recognize personal emails, emails from my clients, etc?

The fact that POPFile doesn't fully support IMAP yet is the #1 reason why I haven't switched from POP, but once this happens I'll probably do the jump.

FWIW, I bypass my inbox completely and try very hard to end the day with zero unread emails. One thing I need to do next is unsubscribe from any mailing list or subscription that I don't really utilize or pay much attention to.

10. On 18 February 2005 at 9:00 PM mathew wrote:

I set up a home IMAP server, and I keep everything on it (or replicated when using a laptop disconnected). I collect all my e-mail into the one set of folders, via custom scripts written in Perl which also do some procmail-style filtering.

I tend to keep archival folders for different people, and for individual projects.

I have separate folders for each incoming mailing list that has a non-trivial amount of traffic.

As a result, the inbox is pretty much only urgent stuff, messages from random humans commenting on my web site, or personal 1-to-1 messages from friends... so I can readily browse it via PDA or phone (both of which have IMAP too) when I'm out and about.

11. On 18 February 2005 at 9:09 PM Roy Schestowitz wrote:

It is all about filters and forwarding for me. Based on sender/s or subject line/s I created about 12 boxes. One of them I check every minute, others I check every 5 minutes, most of them I check once a day and the rest -- once a week.

Remember: a sophisticated network of filters is like having your own full-time secretary. Another tip: manage many different E-mail addresses.

12. On 22 February 2005 at 7:31 PM Ron Jeffries wrote:

Jeffrey:

You post really resonates with me. I copied
it and sent it to several friends with my
comments shown below. God bless thos people
who maintain complicaed hierarchical filing
systems for email. Let's hope they
see the One True Way, soon!

Categories fail because of several problems,
not the least of which is "which category is the
right category to file this in?"

Modern search (as well as available CPU power)
is so overwhelmingly quick that you can search for something as fast or
often faster than you'll find it figuring out
"is it here? or there?"

Some time ago I abandoned ALL topic folders for email at
work as well as for my personal email account.

At work, I use a sequence of chronologically organized
folders within Netscape 7.2.

I have years, then for each month I have one IN and one OUT folder
Using the magic of Netscape search (not great, but adequate),
I can find anything within a given year by searching
on my top level year folder. More often I know the month,
and I know I received the email,
and so I search a smaller set.

for example there is
2005
IN-Jan-2005
OUT-Jan-2005
IN-Feb-2005
OUT-Feb-2005
etc etc

My personal email now all lives in Goggle's
gmail. Yeah, I own a couple of domains and I still
maintain an email address there, but ALL my important,
daily must check/read email goes to Gmail.

The Gmail search is a dream. I do not even bother
with the drill of organizing things into year and month folders,
because I frankly don't need to. Yeah, Ido see little ads that
are relevant to my message. So?

Search, don't sort. It's the right thing to do. ;)

-ron jeffries

13. On 24 February 2005 at 7:51 PM Matt wrote:

Those of you who are still maintaining an email address for once-off or never-again communications might be interested in Spamgourmet, a free redirect service.

Join me for a one-day conference on starting your own company. August 7 in San Francisco.