How do you retrieve email?

I was reading a post over at Web Worker Daily about email. In it, they discuss two types of email users – filers and finders.

The filers use lots of folders to categorize and file away their email. I can remember doing this in Outlook. You see, Outlook’s search function is terrible. So I would file by project or department or whatever seemed appropriate at the time.

Unfortunately, when it came to finding those emails, it wasn’t always easy to remember where I filed it. Was it by project A? Or department B? Or did I put it in the folder where I stored all of Boss’s emails?

It wasn’t a great system, but it was all I could do in Outlook.

Until I became a finder. What changed me to a finder? A couple of things. One was the advent of Google desktop. It radically changed how I found email. But so did inbox zero. With inbox zero I simplified everything. Since my folder system was so complicated, I couldn’t remember where I filed things anyway. Six or seven years’ of email will do that to you. (Why did I keep it that long? I worked for a state institution and I had to keep things relating to educational records.)

So I went to just 5 folders. And with searches via desktop, it didn’t really matter if I had those 5 folders or not. As long as I could remember a portion of the email conversation and even who sent it, I could find it. Sometimes it took refining the search a couple of times. But I always found what I needed.

Now I definitely subscribe to the finder way of retrieving email. Although I still do some filing by project just to make my searches (now I use spotlight on my mac) a bit shorter.

So which one are you? Why? And have you thought about trying an alternative?

[Image: sxc.hu]