Packrat.
I’ve had a sudden realization. I’ve been using Gmail for years.
Well, no, not really. But it turns out that Google and I are in
total agreement on the topic of storing email. Here is a list of the
categories of email which I delete:
- Spam
Everything else is just left in the inbox or squirreled away into a
folder. Actually, I use folders a lot less now than I used to; long
ago I’d try to keep emails filtered and filed by sender, but now I use
folders for “channels”—mailing lists, automatic responses, specific
projects. I’ve recently also taken to “turning over” my inbox every
month, so I have typically no more than several hundred messages in my
main message view at a time. Everything else is archived,
forever.
Between Gmail’s labels (substitute for folders; classify things
which can be easily and strongly grouped together, like
projects and mailing lists) and archiving (moving messages out of your
inbox to “somewhere else”), they’ve covered my entire email
organization model. Well done, guys.