Just keep everything in your inbox, find recent things by scrolling down, and anything beyond that is basically inaccessible, since the search is so bad
(I'm in camp archive everything, delete nothing; but see the Neither camp frequently in colleagues)
Your kids collect stones and sticks. You collect emails, and probably browser tabs and desktop icons. When you move to new PC, all your desktop files ends up in a directory called New folder on the new pc’s desktop and the journey to fill the new desktop starts over before you have New folder and New folder 2 on the upcoming pc.
It's beautiful. Thanks to Moore's law, you can always fit all historical data in half your latest disk space. Though I personally tend to call them "Stuff" or "Junk".
But don't do
Stuff
Junk
That's a rookie strategy, do
Stuff /
Stuff / Stuff
Stuff / Stuff / Junk / ...
When you need to find something old, just go down the folders until you start finding files from the right decade.
I moved my SSD from my old computer into my new one. Because I'm a masochist who manually sets up my partitions with custom labels, it literally worked the first time I booted it. (The only change I did was swapping to the AMD microcode from the Intel microcode because of the processor in my new machine being different). When upgrading SSDs, I just replicated the same partition structure on the new disk and copied everything over with rsync, which also "just worked".
I still can't decide whether these strategies are obvious and intuitive or if they go against literally everything I've learned about what should be feasible. Can't argue with the results though!
Trash, Archive, Folders in Folders, Tags, forget it!
Where is it? In the Inbox. If it's unread, I need to do something, if it's read, I don't.
Although if my clients start to slow down, I will export and delete the oldest year from my personal email. So I guess I do technically archive. But only in bulk and begrudgingly.
Exactly so. If I'm going to do anything with it later, I'll have to read it again anyway.
It's self-culling with time. I've got unread messages deep down on the list. Things that I wanted to do something about months ago, but never did, and they weren't important enough to come up again. And if they ever do come up again, I can see that I received a message and didn't do anything with it.
And then while checking your email you mindlessly click it and realize its the one you have "snoozed" by marking it unread, so you need to mark it unread again.
Now I have a keystroke that will automatically create a TODO with a link to the message. I hit the keystroke and then archive so it no longer shows up in my inbox.
There are lots of poor productivity books/hacks, but the "Do not treat your inbox as a TODO list" has stood the test of time.
I’m in the same camp. Unread vs read is all I need. Also it’s funny when I’m with someone from the “inbox zero” camp and they get stressed seeing my 6-figure inbox count.
Sorry, but unless I can manage my email with sensible rules, I'm not going to manage it.
I need to be able to have rules that let me move email automatically after it's been read or after it's been in the Inbox for some time. But that's not really possible with most server side rules engines (they only look at mail when it arrives), client side rules engines are dead and I don't use email from a fixed desktop machine anyway, and I'm not going to write an imap based filtering engine (I did it once on company equipment, and it wasn't fun enough to do it again).
Once we take care of the bulk of emails that way, it's easier making decisions on the items in the inbox. I usually delete if it's some automated email (e.g. calendar reminder, etc). I archive if it's personal or may have some useful information I want to refer to later (e.g. notification that my electricity bill was paid).
But I lie. Even when I "delete", I don't delete. I merely tag it as "deleted". It's always there on my hard drive. Normally when I do a search, I have to specify "and not tag:deleted".
And those quarantined emails? I neither delete nor archive. They just stay there with the "quarantine" tag.
I dislike that the Gmail app on Android only lets you archive an email from the notification; fastmail has both archive and delete buttons.
I'd like to have a retain-for-one-year button, to move things out of my inbox, but not keep them perpetually. I'd rarely delete immediately, and I'd seldom archive for eternity.
Which camp is it if you don't even look at or read email unless you know there's something specific you need in it? I have 100,000 unread but that's because I did a concerted cleanup sometime in the last couple years. I even unsubscribed to a bunch of stuff. I am planning to tackle it again this month. I've heard of people who use Black Friday as a good trigger on what to unsubscribe from as every company wants to send you something for that.
> I've heard of people who use Black Friday as a good trigger on what to unsubscribe from as every company wants to send you something for that.
That's a good idea. I also use app updates to decide whether I actually need to keep an app on my phone. (There is a convenient "remove" swipe on that screen, so I'm not the only one.)
I haven't seen this option yet: archive things you think are important, delete things you think are not important, but don't permanently delete anything. Just use archive and trash as folders of differing degrees of importance. If you run out of storage you can manually delete some of the oldest items in the trash and be pretty sure you didn't need those things (but this will never be necessary because who runs out of email storage).
My inbox's default retention policy deletes anything that is more than 90 days old unless it has a tag. Receipts, billing statements, messages from real people that I added to my contacts etc all get tagged and retained. Your newsletters, the OTPs, the appointment reminders all fall into the abyss.
But I personally do not like email as a system of record. My response to 'what if I need to know something about the tires' is that I keep a spreadsheet with everything I do to my car.
>Archive: Anything you have a feeling might be useful
>Delete: Anything you’re pretty sure would be useless in the future
Basically what I do, but the problem for a certain type of mind is that "might be useful" is a pretty broad category to fall down. "Years and years of Perl mailing lists in case I want to search them instead of SE/PerlMonks/etc." Yeah, in theory. "Any newsletter I haven't ever read?" I mean, in theory I might search for something from 2011. "ThinkGeek purchases from back in the day?" Yes, definitely! So, in practice, just archive, and let your search results be polluted by daily newsletters.
Still, I try and keep Merlin Mann's Wisdom advice in mind:
>Organizing your email is like alphabetizing your recycling.
That being said, though, there's a line that only becomes clearer and clearer as time goes on: family and friends >>> everything else. I'd take a relative's email I didn't want to reply to when I was in college over pretty much anything. Do whatever you need to do to keep that.
Yeah I agree with this. Archive everything that I think could potentially have value. Any newsletters or nonsense (before I end up unsubscribing) get nuked. Edit: Login codes and login links as well are clear to be deleted as well.
Any actual two way communication with another human absolutely gets archived. I love myself an audit trail. It's saved my ass more than once.
Neither for me on the server. I "move" the emails via IMAP(s) to a local folder in Thunderbird. Thunderbird gets backed up to an encrypted NAS. The NAS gets backed up to multiple encrypted external NVME/SSD drives and placed in lock boxes. One lock box ends up in a vehicle. Data not on the server can not be leaked unless legal hold was enabled creating archives outside the visibility and control of the user.
I keep emails in my inbox until they are no longer relevant (which may be immediately for some emails) and then 99.9% of the time I delete them. I archive maybe a half dozen emails a year, and delete the rest.
I leave everything in the inbox and mark unread if I need to follow up. Following up may involve nothing more than a note about the task on my to-do list. I also delete a lot of useless stuff and have never regretted it.
My inbox is (1) things I need to read (2) a big searchable archive of things I might need later. Nothing more, and certainly not my to-do list. So I don't feel the need to do anything more than I'm doing.
I use the "baby bear" strategy mentioned in the article. My criteria are something like: archive emails from humans as well as important emails like receipts and invoices; delete advertising emails, newsletters, notification emails, and things that I can just as easily find online.
I have partial/spotty archives going back to the early 90s, which then turn into a full archive starting in 2004. It's not often but there are plenty of times where it's been useful to be able to dig up some nugget from 20-30 years ago to answer a question. And also, sometimes it's just fun to go on a nostalgia trip
And that’s why email compromises are so dangerous- aside from all different accesses tied to emails, there’s also a wealth of information inside the inbox.
People make a big deal about Spike Jonze's extended Black Mirror episode (pretty much) Her, but the one part that sticks to me from that movie is when the AI is introduced, it scans the main character's inbox and comes up with the number of useful emails worth saving.
I'm using claws-mail and currently have 53,399 mails in my INBOX and 62,138 mails in my spam folder. I've got a few other mailboxes for mailing lists, some of them 100k entries but I barely read them. I guess I could delete these but my mail folder is only 19.2 GB in size. The storage medium sizes increase so fast that I've never had to delete anything.
Then there's the 3rd option: Neither
Just keep everything in your inbox, find recent things by scrolling down, and anything beyond that is basically inaccessible, since the search is so bad
(I'm in camp archive everything, delete nothing; but see the Neither camp frequently in colleagues)
Your kids collect stones and sticks. You collect emails, and probably browser tabs and desktop icons. When you move to new PC, all your desktop files ends up in a directory called New folder on the new pc’s desktop and the journey to fill the new desktop starts over before you have New folder and New folder 2 on the upcoming pc.
It's beautiful. Thanks to Moore's law, you can always fit all historical data in half your latest disk space. Though I personally tend to call them "Stuff" or "Junk".
But don't do
That's a rookie strategy, do When you need to find something old, just go down the folders until you start finding files from the right decade.I've been telling myself I'll organise my now 4 layers nested stuff folders for 15 years.
A bit off-topic, but can anyone recommend tools to organise this much random stuff?
You need to solve the migration strategy from stones and sticks to first desktop.
If only you could mount a separate home folder that stuck along while you changed roots. One can only dream..
I once had a mac laptop and figured out how to get macos running under proxmox.
I was able to boot macos in a VM and migrate my laptop. It "ascended" into virtuality.
I moved my old pc into a vm. The vm is the new folder.
I moved my SSD from my old computer into my new one. Because I'm a masochist who manually sets up my partitions with custom labels, it literally worked the first time I booted it. (The only change I did was swapping to the AMD microcode from the Intel microcode because of the processor in my new machine being different). When upgrading SSDs, I just replicated the same partition structure on the new disk and copied everything over with rsync, which also "just worked".
I still can't decide whether these strategies are obvious and intuitive or if they go against literally everything I've learned about what should be feasible. Can't argue with the results though!
I am that person.
I'm an unrepentent "neither".
Trash, Archive, Folders in Folders, Tags, forget it!
Where is it? In the Inbox. If it's unread, I need to do something, if it's read, I don't.
Although if my clients start to slow down, I will export and delete the oldest year from my personal email. So I guess I do technically archive. But only in bulk and begrudgingly.
Yup, another inbox only user here. Unread means it's a to-do.
In Gmail you can set it to group all unread at the top.
Sometimes I'll open an email and mark unread again if I need to come back to it.
> If it's unread, I need to do something, if it's read, I don't.
What if you read an email, and need to do something, but can't do it right now? Do you mark it as unread so you can deal with it later?
I did that for years. Thankfully no longer!
Exactly so. If I'm going to do anything with it later, I'll have to read it again anyway.
It's self-culling with time. I've got unread messages deep down on the list. Things that I wanted to do something about months ago, but never did, and they weren't important enough to come up again. And if they ever do come up again, I can see that I received a message and didn't do anything with it.
And then while checking your email you mindlessly click it and realize its the one you have "snoozed" by marking it unread, so you need to mark it unread again.
Rinse, repeat
Yes - that was Hell.
Now I have a keystroke that will automatically create a TODO with a link to the message. I hit the keystroke and then archive so it no longer shows up in my inbox.
There are lots of poor productivity books/hacks, but the "Do not treat your inbox as a TODO list" has stood the test of time.
I’m in the same camp. Unread vs read is all I need. Also it’s funny when I’m with someone from the “inbox zero” camp and they get stressed seeing my 6-figure inbox count.
I was inbox-only since GMail was in beta, and received tons of email notifications and extraneous mail over that 20 year period that didn't get read.
My inbox was at about 100k _unread_ emails with about 280k total.
I am happy to say I am now at inbox-zero (ish).
Check out our product. I'm also a "leave everything in inbox" kind of user.
I've got 100k+ threads in my inbox and full text search is single digit ms.
IMAP search itself is unusable. SQLite on the other hand...
https://marcoapp.io
Terribly triggered by this
Sorry, but unless I can manage my email with sensible rules, I'm not going to manage it.
I need to be able to have rules that let me move email automatically after it's been read or after it's been in the Inbox for some time. But that's not really possible with most server side rules engines (they only look at mail when it arrives), client side rules engines are dead and I don't use email from a fixed desktop machine anyway, and I'm not going to write an imap based filtering engine (I did it once on company equipment, and it wasn't fun enough to do it again).
So Inbox 40,000 it is.
I've recently started writing an app intended for a raspberry pi that uses IMAP to automate this exact thing.
The goal is for it to apply the rules and followup with actions while still letting me interact with my email from any client I want.
A rules engine is our primary next focus at Marco. What you're describing is exactly the way email should work.
https://marcoapp.io
[dead]
Archive or read is what most people ask. Benefits to both approaches.
Archive instead of delete is what we recommend to Inbox Zero customers. As you won’t accidentally delete something important.
But if you really need to claim back that space our tool offers ways to delete the stuff that doesn’t matter.
I only delete spam and such useless emails. Other than that, I just mark email as either read or unread. I never archived an email.
I also maintain an always zero inbox and everything is neatly classified thanks to the power of automation.
A good portion of emails are basically a unified notification mechanism. Delete those once dealt with.
I use notmuch, which is tags based.
The most important thing is not what to do with emails in your inbox, but figuring out what should go in the inbox to begin with.
I have a whitelist. Anything not in the whitelist goes into "quarantine". I give some details here:
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-probl...
HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18100807
Once we take care of the bulk of emails that way, it's easier making decisions on the items in the inbox. I usually delete if it's some automated email (e.g. calendar reminder, etc). I archive if it's personal or may have some useful information I want to refer to later (e.g. notification that my electricity bill was paid).
But I lie. Even when I "delete", I don't delete. I merely tag it as "deleted". It's always there on my hard drive. Normally when I do a search, I have to specify "and not tag:deleted".
And those quarantined emails? I neither delete nor archive. They just stay there with the "quarantine" tag.
I dislike that the Gmail app on Android only lets you archive an email from the notification; fastmail has both archive and delete buttons.
I'd like to have a retain-for-one-year button, to move things out of my inbox, but not keep them perpetually. I'd rarely delete immediately, and I'd seldom archive for eternity.
Which camp is it if you don't even look at or read email unless you know there's something specific you need in it? I have 100,000 unread but that's because I did a concerted cleanup sometime in the last couple years. I even unsubscribed to a bunch of stuff. I am planning to tackle it again this month. I've heard of people who use Black Friday as a good trigger on what to unsubscribe from as every company wants to send you something for that.
> I've heard of people who use Black Friday as a good trigger on what to unsubscribe from as every company wants to send you something for that.
That's a good idea. I also use app updates to decide whether I actually need to keep an app on my phone. (There is a convenient "remove" swipe on that screen, so I'm not the only one.)
I haven't seen this option yet: archive things you think are important, delete things you think are not important, but don't permanently delete anything. Just use archive and trash as folders of differing degrees of importance. If you run out of storage you can manually delete some of the oldest items in the trash and be pretty sure you didn't need those things (but this will never be necessary because who runs out of email storage).
My inbox's default retention policy deletes anything that is more than 90 days old unless it has a tag. Receipts, billing statements, messages from real people that I added to my contacts etc all get tagged and retained. Your newsletters, the OTPs, the appointment reminders all fall into the abyss.
But I personally do not like email as a system of record. My response to 'what if I need to know something about the tires' is that I keep a spreadsheet with everything I do to my car.
>Archive: Anything you have a feeling might be useful
>Delete: Anything you’re pretty sure would be useless in the future
Basically what I do, but the problem for a certain type of mind is that "might be useful" is a pretty broad category to fall down. "Years and years of Perl mailing lists in case I want to search them instead of SE/PerlMonks/etc." Yeah, in theory. "Any newsletter I haven't ever read?" I mean, in theory I might search for something from 2011. "ThinkGeek purchases from back in the day?" Yes, definitely! So, in practice, just archive, and let your search results be polluted by daily newsletters.
Still, I try and keep Merlin Mann's Wisdom advice in mind:
>Organizing your email is like alphabetizing your recycling.
That being said, though, there's a line that only becomes clearer and clearer as time goes on: family and friends >>> everything else. I'd take a relative's email I didn't want to reply to when I was in college over pretty much anything. Do whatever you need to do to keep that.
Yeah I agree with this. Archive everything that I think could potentially have value. Any newsletters or nonsense (before I end up unsubscribing) get nuked. Edit: Login codes and login links as well are clear to be deleted as well.
Any actual two way communication with another human absolutely gets archived. I love myself an audit trail. It's saved my ass more than once.
Neither for me on the server. I "move" the emails via IMAP(s) to a local folder in Thunderbird. Thunderbird gets backed up to an encrypted NAS. The NAS gets backed up to multiple encrypted external NVME/SSD drives and placed in lock boxes. One lock box ends up in a vehicle. Data not on the server can not be leaked unless legal hold was enabled creating archives outside the visibility and control of the user.
I keep emails in my inbox until they are no longer relevant (which may be immediately for some emails) and then 99.9% of the time I delete them. I archive maybe a half dozen emails a year, and delete the rest.
I leave everything in the inbox and mark unread if I need to follow up. Following up may involve nothing more than a note about the task on my to-do list. I also delete a lot of useless stuff and have never regretted it.
My inbox is (1) things I need to read (2) a big searchable archive of things I might need later. Nothing more, and certainly not my to-do list. So I don't feel the need to do anything more than I'm doing.
For my personal mail I like using labels in Gmail instead of archive button. Basically, I categorize mail in a few categories:
1. Receipts, bill, utilities, etc. (Sublabel for every company)
2. Friends&Family (Sublabel for every person)
3. School and school related (Sublabel for every person)
4. Government and government related (Sublabel by organization)
5. Random and miscellaneous
It's archive, but somewhat organized
I use the "baby bear" strategy mentioned in the article. My criteria are something like: archive emails from humans as well as important emails like receipts and invoices; delete advertising emails, newsletters, notification emails, and things that I can just as easily find online.
archive.
I have partial/spotty archives going back to the early 90s, which then turn into a full archive starting in 2004. It's not often but there are plenty of times where it's been useful to be able to dig up some nugget from 20-30 years ago to answer a question. And also, sometimes it's just fun to go on a nostalgia trip
And that’s why email compromises are so dangerous- aside from all different accesses tied to emails, there’s also a wealth of information inside the inbox.
Archive: Nothing
Delete: Everything
I occasionally mass delete useless emails.
People make a big deal about Spike Jonze's extended Black Mirror episode (pretty much) Her, but the one part that sticks to me from that movie is when the AI is introduced, it scans the main character's inbox and comes up with the number of useful emails worth saving.
I'm using claws-mail and currently have 53,399 mails in my INBOX and 62,138 mails in my spam folder. I've got a few other mailboxes for mailing lists, some of them 100k entries but I barely read them. I guess I could delete these but my mail folder is only 19.2 GB in size. The storage medium sizes increase so fast that I've never had to delete anything.
Archive everything team
Delete - if it’s important, then they’ll contact me again if necessary.
Unless there is « proof like » messages, exchange for a specific case years later or something you bought and need proof of that for insurance.
you may not realize it is important until it's too late