Email management: The end of folders?
Posted by Nick Mehta on Sun, Jul 27, 2008 @ 12:41 AM
David Ferris at Ferris Research has a great blog post on foldering versus search for email management.
It's interesting how my own use of folders has evolved over the years. Back at my first startup in 1998, I would file every email into very granular folders like the following that sat in my Personal Folders (PST Files):
Clients
A
Acme Corp.
ABC Corp.
B
Engineering
Marketing
I would even file "Sent Items" into the appropriate folder. Yes - I was pretty nerdy.
A funny thing happened once I started using an email archiving system (initially Enterprise Vault while I worked at VERITAS and Symantec and now LiveOffice since we are a small business): I decided that the amount of time I was spending simply dragging emails into folders was becoming non-trivial.
Like many folks, I get between 200 and 400 messages a day, and as such, email drag-and-drop was eating up time. And because I use an email archiving system, I don't have to worry about email quotas, so dragging emails out of my inbox is no longer necessary.
So I keep everything in my inbox and archive it off. When I need to find something, I search for it.
To me, with the increasing amount of information we receive every day, foldering as a metaphor (which, don't forget, came from our filing cabinet days :) ) will not scale forever.
I agree with Ferris' argument that foldering is still better in some cases since search isn't perfect, but for me, giving up foldering was a big time saver.