[Users] Email organization approaches

[mi]

Trying to summarize what was said so far (and adding my ideas) ....

* Folders may mirror your different email accounts. A very basic and common approach.

* You can create folders after a list or a sender adress (or multiple of these).

* Folders can have a 'theme' or topic which may be defined mail addresses or by filtering after specific keywords.

Ideally you've set up email accounts which already define where this communication belongs to, and could just sort after that.

One simple example would be like 'family', 'hobby', 'finance' and 'work' and such.

Filters can have multiple keywords and it is also possible to add to filters piping the mail  through a script or pgrogram which does more sophisticated things, for example it detecting complex keywords of a list stored in a file ...

* There can be timewise archives sorted into years or months


We can have different criteria on different levels, for example have 'topic' folders on toplevel, then sender/list folders on second level.

If there are only a few folders then the 'hierarchy' of folders can be plain flat but i guess most people maintain complex folder trees. To spare one level i don't use the 'inbox' folder at all and created my folders and subfolders on toplevel and if anything ever ends up in 'inbox' then that would mean my filters need to be updated.
Consequently, sent mails generally stay in the folder (= in thread) where i replied or created the new mail.


Claws normally sorts everything in alphabetic order. My approach for sorting folders is to prepend a number, like

01__bla
02__foo
.
.

I believe that sorting alphabetically is generally not wanted in big folder trees and it would be nice if claws had a configurable tree structure. But i doubt it's really worth the extra code complexity (adding another config file and what if it gets screwed or deleted ...).

I also use colors on folder names. Unfortunatley many colors leave fonts hard to read, depending on background, so i can use only a few. It would help to have different background colors for every folder, too. But after the gtk3 discussion last year, i anticipate that managing styles from claws could be another big pain ion the ass.

And yes, i've also an 'archive' folder where i dump things (often complete folders) that i most likely won't need anymore, until final deletion. Which usually never happens, but who cares :D