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Last active December 21, 2015 07:28
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How I manage lots of email with Mail.app.
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A lot of people complain about Mail.app.

I use Mail.app for work. While I'm typically not a pack-rat, I do like to keep an archive of most messages for business reasons. It does pretty well until I have over 10k emails in a single folder and then it can sometimes run into problems. At least, that has happened with our Exchange provider -- maybe it's not an issue with IMAP; I don't know.

Here is my strategy to manage lots of email in Mail:

  • My Inbox only contains email which I need to act on (need to read, need to reply to, need to create to-do list items on, etc.)
  • As soon as I'm done with an email in my Inbox (read it, replied to it, created to-do-lists items for it), I hit control-command-a to move it to the Archive folder on the server.
  • The Archive and Sent folders contain "recentish" messages and reside on the server so they are available on my phone.
  • On my workstation I have a local folder (i.e., not on the server) called "Attic". Inside Attic are sub-folders for each year.
  • Periodically, I will move older email from the server's Sent and Archive folders to their respective year under Attic.

This in my experience is an easy way to keep folders sainly sized, manageable, and fast ...without getting in the way of my workflow or losing access to recent emails that I may want to refer to on my phone.

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