How are you managing Reference Email

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pleini

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After listening to reListening to GTD (for the 10th time in 10 years). What resonated THIS time was email. David strongly suggested using an A to Z filling system in email. walmartone I have gotten away from this and just relied on the search feature. How are you handling email? GTD pros, any strong opinions?
 
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Many people these days use search instead of A-Z filing. I still file, because I've had too many times when search pulled up too many results to be efficient. Filing only takes me a few seconds in the present, and saves me lots of time in the future.
 
I file into an Archive folder, but I move items into it so that at any time it has a years’s worth of reference email. Right now I am moving email every month from Archive to Archive18-19 (my years do not start in January). This is not for search purposes, but to keep from having one huge Archive directory which could glitch. I also put some email into @Reading and @Shopping for casual reading and shopping. I keep a 2-month backlog in @Shopping.
 
I use folders (over 200) that are filed and then archived by year. Depends on your email client and requirements.
Work is in Outlook that must be archived by year (or when mailbox nears limit).

Home is via a local mailserver (got to love Linux) via Sylpheed or MailMate (OSX) or K9 (Android tablet). Search is fast so no worries with archiving by year. Folder based via rules, little over 12GB stored local going back to 1999 with 500K plus messages.
 
pleini said:
How are you handling email? GTD pros, any strong opinions?
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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.
 
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.
 
I send all my reference email to OneNote and file it appropriately there. It's organized how I think and will search across all my open notebooks so I can always put my eyes on reference with only a little effort.
I also use Office Lens and my Rocketbooks to send paper and handwritten notes to ON. Same filing and search features.
 
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