II use Outlook for my job. Then I have three personal e-mail (two of them with google). I have as well two blogs (another two e-mails). The iPhone and iPad can see all the five e-mails. Finally at home I receive all the e-mails, without the one of the job, into Thunderbird.
How do you manage this complexity?
I currently have 15 separate e-mail accounts. I get them all into Apple Mail. I currently have several folders, 1 each for organizations that I am getting e-mail from where I am an officer for their reference e-mails, Action Support which holds all e-mails that are support for current actions, Reference which is all of my personal reference e-mail (being modified now see below) Ads and News - a folder for all the various incoming advertising and newsletters all automatically sorted by mail rules. Order Info where I store pending order e-mails and order Rcvd where completed ones are files, Software Licenses and then one to collect all the security message regarding our various web sites. I also have 1 folder that gets all messages from an e-mail list and I have a quite a few legacy folders for messages from old lists and subjects. I don't separate out Waiting for and Action Support but put them all into the same folder that I call Action Support.
I am in the middle of changing some stuff. My e-mail system currently has hundreds of thousands of messages going back decades. I do actually refer to messages as much as 25 years old so I can't really delete them. However Apple mail is getting very bogged down by them and search is slower as a result not to mention my rather regular crashes.
I tried both Mail Steward and the automatic Mail Archive system in DEVONThink and both have problems. Mail Steward is very hard to use for search, I never can find what I want easily in it and it's impossible to browse the database. DEVONThink's automatic mail archive cannot bring in my huge big Reference Folder so my database there is incomplete. So I gave up on both of them.
My third attempt is a much more dauntng task but at least it is working. I spend about half an hour a day going through all the old e-mail starting at the oldest and either trashing it or manually save it into a new DEVONThink database. DT's searching is superior and much faster. The problem is that I had hoped I could delete thousands of messages and that is not the case. Once they are safely into the new DT structure I verify that I can see the text. I then delete them from my operational e-mail system. So my new curated mail archive is smaller by a tiny bit and slowly and steadily my mail mail system is being cleaned out. Once this backlog task is finished my plan is to consolidate into just a few folders that I plan to clean out either monthly, quarterly or yearly, depending on how things go. I am thinking that cleaning them out monthly will keep my main e-mail lean and I can easily search in DT. OTOH there are many order info and order rcvd e-mails that I dont't need to keep much past a year or 2 that will end up making my DT system need some ongoing maint as well. I am still undecided about how to handle the final configuration but I won't have to make that decision for quite a while. At least not until I've got all my old stuff sorted and into the new struture and database.
I use exclusively POP mail and never leave mail on any server so I am the sole archive of my mail. Even all my gmail accounts are set to POP so gmail does not keep the mail for me for them either. I also never check e-mail except from my main computer except in a few instances when traveling. Then I will use the webmail options available to me by my mail provider. Yes, it means there is double processing when I return but I'm willing to do that. I have tried processing e-mail on my phone and tablet and it doesn't work for me at all.
I also have a large number of rules in mail that will do a lot of sorting for me.
I use Spam Sieve which is fairly good but I still have to at least look at all the messages that come in as spam because my subjects and contexts are often considered spam. I regularly get good messages from new and unknown correspondents (so I can't white list them in advance) that are flagged as spam but are actually real valid messages.
By way of reference my e-mail volume is typically between 200-300 messages a day. It takes me 30-45 minutes to process each day's e-mail. My inbox is at zero several times a week. My goal is daily but sometimes I run out of processing time so just leave it until the next day. I do make sure it is at zero before my weekly review no matter how long it takes.
