One of the chores I have to do each January the first is to gather up all the previous year’s emails and place them, month by month, in a folder marked with the previous year’s name. So this morning I added a folder “2005” to each email category and moved the folders for each month of 2005 into it (I use Eudora). Then I created a new folder “January 2006” in each category.
I confess: I’m an email packrat.
For certain mailing lists, I have all emails dating back to 1996, sorted by month and year. Others I just place in a year folder, not bothering with the month.
Why do I do this? In one case, it helps with my US tax return (Currency Converter). In other cases, it’s helped me with work situations. Most of the time, however, it does nothing. The emails sit there, clogging up my computer: I have 1.64 GB of email on the disk.
Will I stop? Not until they pry the mouse out of my cold dead hands.
I’m an e-mail packrat, too. I spent a day last week filing old e-mails into folders. I organize the e-mails by sender, though, not date.
I organise both by date and sender, though. I belong to lots of email lists, so each list has its own folder. Under that there is a folder for each year. Under each year is a folder for each month.
When I get emails from friends, I file them in a folder called Friends with a subfolder underneath labeled with their names.
I hardly ever look for old emails except to retrieve an email address to send a new email to. However, one never knws when you’ll need an email from 7 years ago…
I have just no end of mail folders.
For more general stuff, year ones going back to 1990. Sent mail also gets sorted into sent mail folders by year.
Some people and mailing lists have their own folders.
Particular topics/categories may have their own folders as well, for example orders, auctions, coupons and sales, subscription information (both for mailing lists and for sites I have accounts on), even LiveJournal notifications.
Work mail is currently sorted into any of 21 work folders depending on what it’s about.
Huh. I just counted. I have 58 working mail folders.
No idea what that means.