[philm]

I am contemplating a major change to my e-mail workflow, and I am interested in comments/feedback.

I presume that most people, like me, have dozens of folders in Mail.app - including folders within folders - to store my important e-mails. I have a junk folder of course, and I generally throw away messages which are unlikely to be important in the future.

All this sorting out into folders is time consuming, so I was thinking about abandoning this strategy and putting all my e-mails into one big archive folder, and relying on Mail.app's search functionality to find the e-mails I want. More than this, I was also considering not trying to second-guess which e-mails might be important in the future, but just keep them all (except obvious spam I suppose).

I read a good article here about a Mail.app plug-in which allow you to assign simple keystrokes to move e-mails into such a folder.

I would be very interested to learn if anyone was adopting this system. I probably get about 50 'serious' e-mails each day and my messages go back about 12 years.

[Macola]

I do keep my e-mails organized by folders (this is for my business, so I have a folder for each client). I just use rules to automatically direct messages into the appropriate folder. No keystrokes or moving messages required.

What I need, though, is a good method to archive old messages outside of Mail, in a searchable and readable archive. At the moment, I'm using some Applescripts, but I really hope Apple adds a decent archiving function to Leopard Mail.

[philm]

Originally Posted by Macola 

I do keep my e-mails organized by folders (this is for my business, so I have a folder for each client). I just use rules to automatically direct messages into the appropriate folder. No keystrokes or moving messages required.

If I understand you correctly then, you don't really use your In folder much. Supposing you work for IBM, you have an IBM folder which contains old messages (sent ones too?) and new, unread messages which have been filtered there directly?

[legacyb4]

What's the theoretical maximum (if any) of files in a single folder that OS X can track? I would think that might become an issue if you have a lot of email...

[Macola]

Originally Posted by philm 

If I understand you correctly then, you don't really use your In folder much. Supposing you work for IBM, you have an IBM folder which contains old messages (sent ones too?) and new, unread messages which have been filtered there directly?

Exactly. My actual inbox is almost always empty, just containing e-mail that is not covered by rules. I also use smart folders and flags--for example, I have a smart folder for unread items, and another for flagged messages (which is the equivalent of a to-do list).