Anticipating smart folders
According to latest rumors, mac os x 10.4 tiger should be released later this month. I’ll be all over it for mail 2.0 alone.
I recently moved all my e-mails from some 30 folders to my inbox. Let’s face it, filing away e-mails into folders just doesn’t cut it. You’ll always be behind, you’ll have to set some time aside for tediously managing your e-mail and when you really need to find something, you’ll resort to fancy type-ahead search anyway, because it’s the fastest and most reliable way to get at what you’re looking for. If you’re searching across all mailboxes, all folders anyway, why not just keep everything in your inbox?
I’ve set up several rules to automatically apply color labels depending on sender to keep a rough overview of private messages and university stuff, and mail does a decent job at highlighting threads and conversations. The main difficulty lies in keeping track of which e-mails need further processing. In the past, i’d only keep unprocessed e-mails in my inbox and moved them out as soon as they’d been handled, but now without the filing i’ve started to flag them. Problem is, however, that my inbox is slowly getting a little crowded and flagged messages move further and further down the list of messages, becoming more urgent and less visible over time.
With smart folders, as promised for mail 2.0, this won’t be a problem anymore: just create a smart folder for all your flagged messages for easy access while all your e-mails keep living in your inbox. Slice and dice your data as you see fit. Let me tell you - slicing and dicing is the new filing. Soon we’ll all have forgotten this unnecessarily limited notion of dumb folders where a file can only live in one place just for the sake of a dusty metaphor. That concept never did any justice to the many facets especially present in personal data and i most definitely won’t miss it.