Swipe to Archive missing from Sent folder
 

In the iOS app (presumably all AJAX touch interfaces) the Inbox has swipe-to-delete and swipe-to-archive (opposite direction swipes). The Sent folder only has swipe-to-delete and swiping the other way reveals a blank space which does nothing. Can we please have swipe to archive in the Sent folder as well?

I'm curious: why do you want to move sent items to your Archive folder?

Why would I archive my sent email? So they don't sit idle in the Sent folder looking untidy. Same reason I archive my received email. So the Inbox stays empty. Am I doing email wrong? :confused:

Forcing myself to keep those two folders empty means I have to decide to keep something rather than keeping by default. In practice this means I delete more than I archive and I've managed to accrue fewer than 5000 emails in over twenty years ;)

The bonus with having everything in one folder is that I can see both sides of an email conversation in the correct chronology without enabling "conversations view", which confused me no end when I tried it. Turns out most of my friends never create a new email, they reply to the most recent one I last sent to them even when the topic is completely unrelated. Then sometimes they randomly reply to an email that's several years old to start a new email. I'm not joking about this. "Conversations" is a non-starter.

I'd love to hear how you deal with email because I never received any formal training and I'm still learning new strategies. Please tell me you don't use Sent as a long term storage solution :eek:

Archiving Sent Emails
 

As requested over a year ago by @rusl, it would be good for the iOS app to allow SWIPE TO ARCHIVE from the SENT folder. Right now, the same gesture you use to "swipe to archive" actually sends your sent mails to the trash folder which is rather annoying and may lead to the non nintentional loss of sent messages. :eek:

In addition, and this is most likely related to the first request from a system point of view, it would be good to also have an ARCHIVE BUTTON accessible at the top of the screen when having selected the SENT folder in the web interface. :D

Love seeing my old thread revived. I would still like swipe to Archive from the Sent folder for the benefit of other like-minded souls.

But in the meantime I've given up on that dream and worked out a new workflow that's even better. I went into Settings > Identities & Fetch > tap on an identity > Show advanced settings > Save a copy of messages I send from the identity in my Inbox folder :D

Copies of outgoing emails end up in the Inbox instead of the Sent folder. I can immediately swipe to archive from the Inbox after sending an email. I even went into the Folder Settings to hide the Sent folder entirely. Problem solved, quicker to perform this action, and one less folder in the tree :p

I love how different people use email in different ways and Fastmail allows us to do whatever we want, or find interesting ways to get around the limitations imposed ;)

Why haven't you set the folder to whoich sent email is saved to the archive folder instead of the inbox? Then you woulg not have to manually archive it after sending.

I always save sent email together with received email. I have several identities with different folders assigned for the sent mail. I also save a lot of email in subfolders of those folders, and that's one of the main reasons why I still use the classic interface (it allows to overide the folder to which the sent message is sent to per composed message. The new interface makes me chase the sent messages to fike them where I want them. That also one reason I seldom use the phone app to compose)

SWIPE TO ARCHIVE from the SENT folder
 

Thanks to rusl and hadaso for their interest in this "revived thread". I wish our friends from Fastmail would take notice of this exchange, and provide us with their feedback on my above query. :rolleyes:

I have my Sent folder set to purge after 90 days so I archive anything important I've sent.

So, there is a good reason to have the "sent" folder different than the "Archive" folder. IMAP Email programs save messages to the "Sent" folder, and then there is a complete downloaded copy of the Sent folder on the device.

If the Sent folder is also the Archive for Sent Items, it grows to hundreds of megabytes, then Gigabytes. This boggs down many email clients, because many are not designed to have that large of a database of emails. It starts hogging memory, and slowing down my device, whether desktop or mobile.

So with my Sent items folder, I have to manually move Sent items to the Archive folder every few months. What a pain.

/cl

Thanks for pitching in. May our friends at Fastmail take note and do something about my request. :rolleyes:

One solution is to provide an option to "Archive messages more than _____ old." in the Folder view...

This is not really my point: what I am requesting is that the sent folder be treated just like the inbox in the sense that we would also have an "archive" button on the web interface, to easily select "archive" or "delete" depending on which sent mail we want to keep and which one we want to archive. Likewise, the mail application on my iPhone should behave in a standard manner, i.e. when I swipe to archive from the sent folder, it should indeed send to archive instead of sending to trash as it is the case today, which is at best misleading and at worse very dangerous.

Gotcha, your solution would not help me, however... ;) I'd like both to be implemented. :D

/cl

The reason I've set up my little workflow to place a copy of the sent email in the Inbox is so I can choose to swipe it to the Archive, or I can delete it (I delete most of my email if it's trivial conversation), or I can file it to a special folder (such as a folder for a specific project I'm working on). Also, after sending an email I am typically returned to the Inbox view so this is the folder from which I can take action.

But leaving my little hack aside, it would be nice to have "swipe to archive" and an archive button in the Sent folder for people that want to use the default configuration.. It's simply missing.

Indeed, a big +1 from me for this feature as well. But it is quite clear that FM have no intention of providing it. The only mysterious thing is WHY. If you look earlier in this thread, you'll find Neilj, a member of the FM team, asking why people want to archive their sent messages. Neil, it seems like a perfectly normal thing to want to do, and lots of us want to do it. It seems so obvious and natural to me, that I feel it is incumbent on YOU to explain why you think this practice should be DISCOURAGED! Come on, FM, tell us why you refuse to give us this absolutely obvious feature! If your response is good enough, and convinces me to change the way I manage my email (I'm always open to persuasion in better ways to do things :)), then I (and perhaps many others) will stop hassling you about it!

As stated in my other thread - just posted, on archive and conversations view, the FASTMAIL method of email works good for only those people that follow Fastmail's preferred workflow method.

When you start using Outlook and other offline email programs, the Fastmail view of the universe begins to break down. An endless Sent items folder ONLY complicates things - because Outlook begins to bog down after offline messages get to a gigabyte of storage. I must archive sent items to keep outlook and other email programs which cannot handle 10 years worth of sent items...

I left Apple because I don't follow their workflow, and thus, their devices with a closed ecosystem doesn't work for me.... I don't want Fastmail to do the same.

Directing copies of all sent items to the Inbox instead of to the Sent folder is a stroke of genius!
I'd like to thank rusl for thinking up this brilliantly simple wheeze, and for sharing it with us.

Revival of "Swipe to Archive missing from Sent folder"
 

Couple of years later... reviving my request for the "Swipe to Archive" to function correctly when used in the Sent folder.

In addition, it would be good to also have an "archive" button at the bottom of the mobile interface when in the sent folder, i.e. use the same layout as in the inbox folder. :cool:

Couple of years?

FOUR years later, there's rarely any FM staff here. You'll have to raise a support ticket. Let us know if FM are helpful.

this is interesting - I never thought of archiving my sent folder. This is how I have been using it (rightly or wrongly).

Archive: all the received email I want to keep (trash the rest)
Sent: all the sent email I want to keep (trash the rest)

...which, for me, makes it easier to find things.

Outlook would have a problem with too many messages in a folder, so I had to archive my sent folder.

This is one way
 

There is no right or wrong way to manage our emails, simply different approaches. I just wish we would have the flexibility / option to archive "sent mails" with one button / key press :)

Same here, largely because most email clients are designed to show the "From" address in every other folder. When I move my sent messages elsewhere, I lose the ability to see who I actually sent them to at a glance — instead I just see my own name everywhere.

Good point
 

You are making a very good point. Using a mail app like Outlook on a PC, I have columns for both "from" and "to" in my archive, but you are right that using either the default format, or when using mobile apps, keeping sent mails in the sent box do provide such benefit, thank you :)

You can use subfolders of the Sent folder, and will then see the recipients. The problem comes when you want to mix sent and received messages in a single folder, but have multiple correspondents whose messages you stored in the folder. The best I can suggest there is to use a different alias (From address) for every correspondent, combined with also using a bcc with the same email address for each message sent. That way, whether viewing the From address or the recipients, you always see the appropriate alias. Then use subfolders of Sent for these combined Sent plus Received message collection.

I get the argument about keeping sent mail in Sent because it's easy to scan to see who the receipients are, rather than seeing your own name a lot.

I keep my Sent folder mostly clean, pushing everything eventually to Archive, because Sent serves the function of reminding me who I've emailed recently that I'm waiting for a response from. When a response to a particular outbound message comes, that message gets moved to Archive. Without this, very often I would send off emails that might never get responded to, and I would completely forget about it.

I don't need to wade into the Archive to find history that often, and when I do, the advanced search functions are perfectly sufficient to see who said what when. Nowadays the latest tech available in the FM web client could probably be easily used to satify my need while still keeping all my sent in Sent, but like many people I have a habitual workflow developed many years ago.

Labels and sent messages
 

I have been using Labels mode for a few months (since it was in beta). This allows me to view the Sent label to see the messages I have sent, but I can then easily add the appropriate label(s) to a sent message so that I can also view the message in the appropriate folders/labels. So my goal is keeping the Sent label on all messages I have sent, and adding additional labels to characterize messages.

For example, I just sent some friends a new message which had to do with a science-related topic.

• The sent messages shows up under the Sent label/folder.
• I can select that message inside the Sent label in the tree, then add labels as follows with keyboard shortcuts:
  • "l" (lowercase L)
  • "fri" (finds my Friends label)
  • Enter key (toggles selection of the Friends label)
  • "sci" (finds my Science label)
  • Enter key (toggles selection of the Science label)
  • CTL-Enter (saves the label selection)

I find the label feature (and the ability to add a color to a label and keyboard shortcuts) very useful.

• I can view my Sent label/folder and immediately see which labels/folders I have associated with each sent message. The label color feature helps me find certain labels very quickly.
• While viewing a message/thread, clicking a label name at the top (below the email subject) will open that label/folder.
• I have an Action label, and I add that label to messages I need to handle in the next few days. So I can take those messages out of my Inbox and place them where they will reside long term, but the additional Action label allows me to quickly view these messages.

By the way, as described in this post you can find any messages you have sent using the search:
Bill