… I guess I will write again in a month or so and tell you how my moving around between mail clients actually ended … Since yesterday night, I’ve been messing around with Thunderbird again and I really love how fast it is and so on, but I’m missing the threaded view of Mail.app :-( The whole sorting in Thunderbird simply doesn’t work the way I want it to. So to prevent the whole n*10^4-messages-inbox problem, I’ve now started cleaning up my Gmail account and plan to only keep in my inbox (in whatever client I’m going to end up with) only what I really think is necessary. Everything else will be deleted the moment I see it or will be moved to an archive folder (if I think it might come in handy in the future). So the inbox will be nothing more than a queue ;)
Saving my self or getting saved by Merlin Mann
I’m currently also reading Merlin Mann’s InboxZero series to find out, if something like this is really a desirable state for me.
If you still treat every email in your growing inbox like a Christmas present that must be savored, it might be time to get a bit lighter on your feet.Inbox Zero: Articles of faith
Good point :-? I guess this is really my biggest problem. I tend to think about emails as information that might come in handy at a later point of time and so I have only deleted a handful of them over the last couple of years (spam and simply informational stuff not included). And well … this also includes mailinglists.
What now?
So here is what I’m going to do about it:
- Clean up my web-based accounts to only hold necessary emails (should be repeated about every month or so). This will also make moving between email clients way easier (thanks to missing IMAP support on Gmail not completely painless but still 1000x easier that what I did yesterday and the day before that).
- Wipe out my current Mail.app installation and start from scratch.
- Create an archive folder, one of university related stuff and so on
- Define Act-On rules for moving stuff manually from the inbox into these folders
I guess this should do it. I’ve just finished step 1 (started at about 1300 today and … well, I really just finished it) for at least the Gmail account, reducing my inbox from more than 8000 conversations to a few hundred (what’s left of this month ;-)).
Now at least Mail.app should finally be able to handle that inbox :) And switching from one app to another should now only take a very limited amount of time compared to the whole “I move a folder and buy a pizza” story.
Sorry, that this, and probably another couple of posts to come in the future are not really tech-related, but I simply let off some steam about this whole issue :-)
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