| The problem I have: I've got too much mail coming in to use manual "archive" effectively. I filter mail aggressively. My inbox currently sits just below 2000 messages. "All" folder has nearly 25,000 messages. Given a 1-week average, I seem to get about 200 emails/day. Most of those are machine-generated notifications or various list / subscribed mails. Subscriptions are generally ingnorable, though I'll be interested in stuff that pertains to my own posts, and occasionally search archives for issues related to things I've encountered (dual curse of GMail: it makes handling mail a bit awkward, but its search utilities are pretty good). Those filter rules are also a bit funky. Where procmail gives great power (and requires great responsibility), GMail's filter syntax is more limited, doesn't allow running arbitrary commands (duh), and leaves me a bit confused on the order of application of filters (though it seems better than MS Outlook, which was completely broken in this regard). My email is not just a to-do list. It is in part a to-do list. It's a reminder pile. It's a knowledgebase. It's a news stream. It's a "oh, X happened, let's see if there's any other notice of it elsewhere in mail". Not a one-size-fits-all tool. My preferred interface |