Managing Mail

I’ve always had a problem with managing my mailbox, I just didn’t have the determination or patience to be organized and I couldn’t even understand how it was meant to help me in the first place, I’d read a lot on Inbox Zero, from Merlin’s writings on 43 Folders, and finally realised what the problem was and how it would soon start effecting me, here’s the page turning quote:

Here’s the deal: your email has been accumulating because you don’t have the time to answer it properly, which is certainly reasonable and accurate. You also fear losing track of the email you haven’t responded to — that it will fall between the cracks. This fear is also reasonable and accurate. But you’re just as keenly aware that with the backlog of email you have plus the increasing rate of incoming messages you receive each day, you can’t possibly ever catch up. This, sadly, is also entirely reasonable and accurate. It’s all reasonable and it’s all accurate, but come on: something’s gotta give.

Though I must admit, it was not a blog post or article that inspired me straight away to clean up my inbox – but the fact that I couldn’t (and still can’t) find my invoice for the software application, Pukka. In the end I decided that I wasn’t going to let that happen again, so adopted a method: instead of having one master inbox, have several smaller ones that filter out the noise. In the end I settled on using some aspects of Inbox Zero, more specifically having an Action, Reply and Hold mailbox. These three folders are all manually added to. I decided to not set any rules (more on that later) for these folders for a couple of reasons: first, so I have a more active role in deciding what is important in my workflow and secondly because I don’t trust Mail to get it totally right. A computer isn’t quite good enough at setting my priorities

I’m not going to go into some of the intraccies of Inbox Zero, Merlin’s covered that pretty well, but I do want to talk briefly about rules within Apple Mail.

All of my other inboxes have one, if not more rules associated with them. A rule is a set of parameters you assign to an inbox. Below is a screenshot of my Bacn mailbox rule, which I stole of Michael Mistretta after it was mentioned in his interview with Chris Bowler:

As you can see I have the email addresses that Flickr, Facebook and Twitter use to send me updates. The ‘From’ refers to what it will look in – in this case the email address. ‘is equal to’ means that it has to be exactly that. And the final box is for whatever you are referencing the rule to. Rules however, aren’t limited to the email address it’s from. You can choose keywords, dates and subjects. Now that a lot of the noise is filtered out; it is far easier to get to the more pressing correspondences.

I of course, also have an ‘Archives’ folder for those emails that aren’t relevant to my day to day work – but may come in useful in the future. For instance, I have a copy of the email containing the final version of this blog’s theme and the instructions on how to set it up.

From there it really depends what I’m working on at the time, so right now I have a Desktop Vibes folder that all comments left on posts go to – or any emails I get from it’s editor Chris. This is all accomplished with rules that have been set up earlier. I’m not going to lie, it took me a while to get exactly what I wanted from them and at one point I got totally lost, and worried that I’d accidently deleted four months worth of important emails.

But what has been the outcome of all this comprehensive email management? I at least feel a lot more satisfied and less overwhelmed when I open up Mail every morning. And of course, I’ve achieved the objective that I set out to reach when I started – I know where things are kept! What’s next? I’m pretty satisfied with the way things are working right now so I don’t see any immediate changes that that I’d make straight away.

If you’re looking for a good guide for setting up rules in Mail. There aren’t any (at least that I could find!). So in an effort to solve this, I’m in the process of writing up an article for Desktop Vibes on this very subject. I’d be interested in hearing how you regulate your email. Do you think you have to get a certain amount of email before it becomes necessary or is it a good habit to get into?