Physical manifestation of what my email inbox would look like

If you are anything like me, you have tons of email.  If you are a user of one of those web-mail sites like Gmail or Hotmail where you have tons of space, you may not even delete old email messages (with Gmail’s archiving option, why would you need to?).  For instance, in my old Hotmail inbox I currently have 3119 messages and most of them I have no intention of going back to organize them any time soon.

This brings up the question of this post: How do YOU organize your email messages so you can go back to find them when you need them?

Many webmail sites use folders that you can set up in order to organize your messages by topic or importance.  You can either drag and drop your messages into the appropriate folders or you can set up filters to automatically send them there.  Gmail uses a different, but similar, but much more flexible system with what they call tags instead of folders.  This way messages can have several different tags and therefore they can be in several different categories at the same time.  Either way, there is always a way to organize those email messages.

You’ll also notice that most webmail sites also have an email search box.  This way if you are looking for a very specific email in a very disorganized inbox (cough, cough!), all you have to do is type in a few search terms and you’ll hopefully find the message without an issue.  In fact, if a message in Gmail is archived, it is removed from the inbox altogether but it’ll still show up for searches.  When I began to hear that people are beginning to lose patience with organization tools and are beginning to rely on searches to find their long lost email messages, I began to not feel as guilty about my own jumbled up mess of an email inbox!

OK, so come clean!  How do you go about finding those lost emails from 5 years ago that you never thought you’d ever need?  Let me know, I could use the help!