Macworld’s Massive Mail.app Mélange
MacWorld seems to be heaving with articles of interest to Mail.app users today.
Kelly Turner kicks things off 
with a confession about her bulging inbox, its 35,000 emails and the level of self-deception involved in telling herself that her system was working:
…I often lost track of messages that still needed to be dealt with. As new messages arrived and older ones disappeared from my screen, I seldom thought to scroll down to see what was still unread. And although I’d developed elaborate coping mechanisms (using colors and flags and searches to identify messages) simply having an ocean of e-mail in front of me made the process of answering and checking e-mail seem like a Herculean task.
This forms a nice segue to the first part of Joe Kissel’s three-part “email renovation” series. He begins with a series of tips on reducing the amount of traffic that comes into your inbox in the first place—dealing with spam, all those hilarious joke-a-minute emails that your friends and family insist on circulating, learning what belongs in Mail.app and what belongs in iChat and more.
Part Two is on “Meet your new filing system”. I’ll be amazed if it doesn’t mention Mail Act-on and MailTags , the two premier organisational plugins for Mail.app.
If you can’t wait for Joe’s next installment you can browse through past posts of mine (one, two, three) on getting things done with Mail Act-on and MailTags. Or read them now and see how much better Joe’s tips are when he posts them!
Joe also takes the chance to put up some links to articles he wrote in February 2007 on “clearing away the clutter” in your inbox. Anything by Joe is worth the time spent reading it. These are no exception.
Finally, Joe has written a piece on coming to grips with notes and to-dos in Leopard Mail. He offers some smart tips on moving your calenders and to-dos to an IMAP account. However, be sure to read the comments as well and see what problems people are having with getting iCal to behave.
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June 26th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Interesting article - I can’t imagine emptying my inbox. Ever. I have close to 8000 messages in there, and I can’t even remember the last time I looked in my Inbox - nevermind, I guess it was just now to see how high the count was!
Then again, sometimes my “to-do” folder starts acting like my inbox because I just shove all my mail in there …. mail badger helps to pester me about those.