Are folders/labels really needed ?

[evfrson]

I am thinking of getting rid of all my user folders/labels and just archiving my emails into a single folder and relying on Fastmail search to find what I want if I need to.
Does anyone else here do that or can anyone see a major downside to this ?

[Terry]

Originally Posted by evfrson

I am thinking of getting rid of all my user folders/labels and just archiving my emails into a single folder and relying on Fastmail search to find what I want if I need to.
Does anyone else here do that or can anyone see a major downside to this ?

Yes you will still have 1 folder marked folder for your search.
so you will actually have 2 folders showing.

gmail has nothing above the in-box folder......

[Avion]

Originally Posted by evfrson

I am thinking of getting rid of all my user folders/labels and just archiving my emails into a single folder and relying on Fastmail search to find what I want if I need to.
Does anyone else here do that or can anyone see a major downside to this ?

I have a couple of folders that utilize the 'auto purge after x days' - for example:

Notifications from EMD.
Monthly reminders to action something.
Etc.

I also have saved searches for stuff I regularly need to look up.

Apart from that, excluding the usual folders, no other folders.

[evfrson]

Originally Posted by Avion

I have a couple of folders that utilize the 'auto purge after x days' - for example:

Notifications from EMD.
Monthly reminders to action something.
Etc.

I also have saved searches for stuff I regularly need to look up.

Apart from that, excluding the usual folders, no other folders.

I will probably do something very similar to that.

[JeremyNicoll]

Originally Posted by evfrson

I am thinking of getting rid of all my user folders/labels and just archiving my emails into a single folder and relying on Fastmail search to find what I want if I need to.
Does anyone else here do that or can anyone see a major downside to this ?

Why? If you already have mails segregated in a way that makes sense to you, why undo all of that?

How efficient Search is depends I suppose on the volume of mail that needs to be searched, but searching a smaller quantity is always going to be faster.


I think in your situation I might test a halfway house solution, eg putting all your financial mails in one folder, or all of those from 2019 (if you don't do that already) ... because if you do this & then find you don't like it you'll have a lot of work to get back to where you are now.

Also, don't delete all your filter rules (if you have lots) - just mark each (or most) of them disabled. If you're deleting the folders that rules previously routed mail to I think it won't let you unless you change those rules to route mail to some other extant folder first. But you could change lots of possibly redundant rules to route things to one folder - maybe INBOX - prior to disabling the rules. Then if you need to reinstate the rules later it's much less effort than recreating them all from scratch.

[pjroutledge]

Originally Posted by evfrson

I am thinking of getting rid of all my user folders/labels and just archiving my emails into a single folder and relying on Fastmail search to find what I want if I need to.
Does anyone else here do that or can anyone see a major downside to this ?

Almost.

Many years ago (before we used PCs and mobile phones for everything) I did a Time Management course and was taught that we waste a lot of time organising and filing things away that we never need again. The recommended practice was to just put everything in one big file (after each thing had been actioned of course) and then search for things if they were ever needed again. I put this into practice and was a total believer almost immediately. Couldn't believe how much time I'd been wasting on organisation and filing.

Then, when computers and then the Internet took off, I noticed that people were still trying to organise and file things on the Internet. Remember Yahoo!'s attempt to organise websites in a directory tree?
Then Google came along and essentially implemented the Time Management recommendation of using search - albeit that Google was actually indexing in the background to make search feasible. (It makes sense to use computers to do continuous indexing but it didn't make sense for me to do it with paper documents. I just sorted them roughly chronologically by putting the latest things on top of the pile.)

While I was working (had to use Outlook at work) I got rid of nearly all folders many years ago and initially just kept everything in the Inbox, again implementing the Time Management concept of not wasting precious time on organisation and filing.
But after a while Outlook slowed down and I suspected it was due to the size of the Inbox as that was the folder that was opened by default on start up.
So I created an 'Archive' folder and set a rule to move everything more than six months (maybe, can't remember exactly how long) old to Archive each day. Outlook sped up, back to a more comfortable speed.

Anytime I needed anything in Outlook I just used search. There were many, many times I'd be on the phone with somebody and we'd be trying to find some old email. My search always won. I'd hear the other person digging down through multiple levels of folders trying to remember where they'd put the email, often without success.

I do now use a small and simple set of labels for some very specific things, but all of my emails still just go to either the trash or the archive folder (and the sent folder just because of the way email works). I also have saved searches set up (using Fastmail on the web) for a couple of frequent correspondents.

[hadaso]

I have lots of folders and subfolders (ans some subsubfolders) and the most frequent method i use to find email is to search for it.
However sometimes I do need to look in a folder because I cannot think of what to search for to find some messages, but I can locate them by looking in a folder and I know approximately when they where sent or received (sometimes I do it by searching by time stamp and limiting the search to a folder).
I could get rid of most of my folders if there was a way to attach noted to messages, because then I add keywords. I don't really need the full power of a folder tree with more than a 100 folders because I mainly use them as a substitute for keywords that I cannot add to emails to make them searchable.
I still do want to separate my personal email from work emails and file them in separate folders (and in the past when I had several employers it was important to me to separate email related to the different employers I worked for).

[pjroutledge]

Originally Posted by hadaso

I could get rid of most of my folders if there was a way to attach noted to messages, because then I add keywords. I don't really need the full power of a folder tree with more than a 100 folders because I mainly use them as a substitute for keywords that I cannot add to emails to make them searchable.

Your 'keywords' is a very good description of 'labels' - you can add any number of labels to emails, and they're searchable.
(I think of 'folders' as a subset of 'labels', the difference being that only one folder can be associated with a particular email. To associate N folders to an email, it's necessary to have 1 original and (N-1) copies of the email. Not so with labels.)

I would also like to add notes to emails. But more like text (eg ideas for action or response, maybe some notes if I make a related phone call, etc).

[BritTim]

Originally Posted by pjroutledge

Your 'keywords' is a very good description of 'labels' - you can add any number of labels to emails, and they're searchable.
(I think of 'folders' as a subset of 'labels', the difference being that only one folder can be associated with a particular email. To associate N folders to an email, it's necessary to have 1 original and (N-1) copies of the email. Not so with labels.)

I would also like to add notes to emails. But more like text (eg ideas for action or response, maybe some notes if I make a related phone call, etc).

One approach I have used is to have a HasNotes label that I can assign to messages. I then have a big MailNotes text file where the notes associated with each message is prefixed with the date a message was sent or received. This allows me pretty quickly to find the notes associated with a specific message and (more important) gives me a single place to review for possible follow up actions with the ability to quickly find the associated email(s) which are labelled HasNotes with a known sent/received date.

[evfrson]

Thanks for all the replies guys - some really useful information here.
I am going to go ahead and make my setup as simple and minimal as possible but at the same time keeping it useable.

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by pjroutledge

(I think of 'folders' as a subset of 'labels', the difference being that only one folder can be associated with a particular email. To associate N folders to an email, it's necessary to have 1 original and (N-1) copies of the email. Not so with labels.)

Actually you can associate multiple folders with one message. However it seems that you can no longer duplicate a message in the web interface by "copying" it to a different folder (holding "alt" while dragging it to a folder). If you "copy" a message and then delete an attachment from one copy, the attachment is deleted from all copies, indicating that they were not multiple copies (but it seems that copying to a shared folder of another user does create a copy). I think there's very little difference between folders and labels in Fastmail. The difference is mostly in how some actions are implemented in the webmail interface, but not in the backend.

Originally Posted by pjroutledge

I would also like to add notes to emails. But more like text (eg ideas for action or response, maybe some notes if I make a related phone call, etc).

The point is that notes are versatile: you can do many different things with them. You can write instructions to yourself and snooze the message to whenever you plan to perform these instructions, or you can add context in case you ever have to recall the context of the message, and file it away.
When you store paper documents in a pile, and have a page you think would be unusable when you find it in the future, then you either throw it away, or add some info that would make it usable if you ever need it.

Originally Posted by BritTim

One approach I have used is to have a HasNotes label that I can assign to messages. I then have a big MailNotes text file where the notes associated with each message is prefixed with the date a message was sent or received. This allows me pretty quickly to find the notes associated with a specific message and (more important) gives me a single place to review for possible follow up actions with the ability to quickly find the associated email(s) which are labelled HasNotes with a known sent/received date.

That's an interesting approach. But then being able to just add a keyword "HasNotes" that can be searched for would achieve the same without having to maintain an additional label/folder for it.

I sometimes (rarely, perhaps too rarely) forward a message to myself to add comments. Then I can also schedule it to be sent to me when I expect deal with the comments, or snooze the received forwarded message until that time. However, sending a message to myself creates two copies of the message (usually one in the sent folder and one in the inbox). Sometimes I put the notes in the calendar.
Since Fastmail already implements notes as messages with reduced headers in a special mail folder/label, perhaps they could implement notes attached to conversations by allowing such notes to be created as a response to a message. Then in conversation view they would be shown within the conversation. I don't use conversation view so it would not solve my problem. The most frequent way I view a set of messages is by searching for "with:someone". Usually this would show me all available information about that "someone". But if I forward a mail to myself to add notes it will not be included in that search. If I remove the "with:" and search for "someone" then it would search in all headers and in the body of the message, so as long as I don't erase the string "someone" from the forwarded message it would find it.
Anyway, I think that a function that allows attaching simple short text notes (that would be stored in a header within the stored email message) is the simplest way to allow people to drastically reduce the number of folders/labels they need to maintain and rely on search instead, and at the same time can simplify lots of other systems people build for themselves, allowing people to add to a stored message references to where additional relevant info is (a separate text file, calendar entries, a paper document in a file cabinet, a labeled box in the basement, etc.).

[TenFour]

Not saying this would work for everyone, but I worked for a company where the CEO received tons of email every day. He didn't file or archive anything--just left everything in the Inbox. He did periodically throughout the day skim and delete most messages, or he would take immediate action. His philosophy was that if something required action he would do it right away or send it on to someone else. If it didn't require immediate action it was either worth deleting or leaving alone, to possibly be found later via search. I do something similar (with Gmail). I skim emails all day, whenever I have an odd moment, and then either delete, archive, or occasionally star a message for later use. The starred messages often get deleted or archived within a day or two.

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by TenFour

... His philosophy was that if something required action he would do it right away or send it on to someone else...

That's what I would do if I were the CEO

However, as I am not the CEO I am the one who would need to take action after collecting all the relevant info, so I need a more complicated system than a CEO...