15 words statement: Sort all emails into two categories and use desktop search. Do not forget backup.
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It’s mainly two types of emails you have to deal with in your life:
1. Private emails
2. Business emails
For both kinds the number of emails is rather increasing and you should at least spend one singlenthought on how to deal with it.
This post focuses on the Business emails. However, this could be applied to private emails, as well.
Basically, it does not matter how many emails you get. It is the first step to decide whether you want to or need to save your emails for any situation coming after you sent or received an email.
In order to quickly find an email or an email thread I found the following very usefull:
1. Do not delete emails
2. Sort your emails by max. two criteria (e.g. Month & In/Outbox)
3. Have a desktop search for searching across the two sorting criteria
4. Backup your email folders and test restoring
I used to categorize my emails per topic or project or initiative or line function. This gave me a good chance of finding the email I looked for very quickly. However, that was true only for the starting phase as the number of folders increased and, hence, the time for searching across all folders as well.
As for private emails not sorting at all is an option I am checking out since some time.
Obviously, my account’s mailbox size is increasing a lot, which is btw. one of the constraints to be considered in a business environment where the size of mailbox stores is limited to some hundreds of megabyte.
Please, share you view on this matter. Would be great to find a better way of organizing emails.
aViewOnIt 