[Users] Email organization approaches

[Charles Lane]

On Sun, 5 Feb 2023 20:11:56 +0000
pete <petegn at mail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 5 Feb 2023 11:04:30 -0800
> Ben Hancock <ben at benghancock.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hi Claws Users,
> >
> > This is not a Claws-specific question, but I figure many on the list
> > may have good ideas (and strong opinions) about the best ways to
> > organize email. The common paradigms seem to be:

Filtering to put incoming mail into "subfolders" of INBOX (things
like "MailList/Claws" "Syslogs/Problem" ...only ~10 of these. The
point is to get filters to do the first pass at organizing and is the
email that gets initial attention.
Stuff that doesn't filter lands in the main INBOX.  

Next, a set of subject-folders for the "current year"; things
like "AAA_Current/Personal/Finance" "AAA_Current/Safety/RadSafety"
to make it easy to find recent stuff, without cluttering INBOX
subfolders. The "AAA_Current" is to keep them all at the top of
the folder list, where they are easy to find. 

THEN, huge numbers of folders for archiving, divided in main
categories, then subject with a "year" in the name, so
"Personal/Purchase/Amazon-2021". 

Sometime in January, I have to spend an hour moving the accumulated
email in AAA_Current folders to archival locations...every now and
then subjects that are old and idle get moved to an "Archive" main
category. 

In this age of cheap terabyte drives, there's not much reason to delete
(possibly) useful emails, and I have some that date back to ~1983; more
for sentimental value than anything else. But being able to narrow the
search window for emails of the past few years is useful. I've found
that when I want to use "search" for an email, it's all to frequent that
I misremember the text I want, or it's something that the standard
search doesn't work very well at finding (a phrase split between lines).
So being able to have few enough emails in folders so that they can be
scanned "by hand" if all else fails is still useful. 

Hope this helps, and I don't expect *anyone* do things the same way. 
-- 
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