How are you handling email? GTD pros, any strong opinions?
Very strong opinions
I run POP email accounts from a single machine so all my email is always pulled down to my machine and I never leave it on the server. I do not want my email left on any device that I cannot control for long so I have mail pull messages down every few minutes. I also do not want to process email on a device I am efficient at so having mail on one computer is not a hardship, it's a benefit.
I file all the emails I want to keep into a few folders, reference, one folder each for the organizations I am an officer in, one for orders pending and one for orders received and of course sent messages. Every month I move email out of Apple Mail and into a curated mail archive database in DEVONThink. I keep a rolling year to 6 months (I'm playing with making it the shorter timeframe now) in Apple mail and then the older stuff is in DT. The DT database has all mail, sent, rcvd, orders etc in it in folders by year. I find that the search in DT is superior so I don't need the category folders there. Most of my access is to emails from within the last year but I regularly access and search email going back decades. My current DT email database is over 14GB with hundreds of thousands of emails going back to 1995 when we got our first personal domain name. I do have some stuff from the WELL from 1985-86ish and some stuff from other sources including USENET that's even earlier but those posts are not in my DT database, yet. It's a someday/maybe project to extract them all out and get them in there for ease of searching.