[Titan2189]

Then there's the 3rd option: Neither

Just keep everything in your inbox, find recent things by scrolling down, and anything beyond that is basically inaccessible, since the search is so bad

(I'm in camp archive everything, delete nothing; but see the Neither camp frequently in colleagues)

[xmlninja]

Your kids collect stones and sticks. You collect emails, and probably browser tabs and desktop icons. When you move to new PC, all your desktop files ends up in a directory called New folder on the new pc’s desktop and the journey to fill the new desktop starts over before you have New folder and New folder 2 on the upcoming pc.

[marginalia_nu]

It's beautiful. Thanks to Moore's law, you can always fit all historical data in half your latest disk space. Though I personally tend to call them "Stuff" or "Junk".

But don't do

  Stuff
  Junk

That's a rookie strategy, do

  Stuff /
  Stuff / Stuff
  Stuff / Stuff / Junk / ...

When you need to find something old, just go down the folders until you start finding files from the right decade.

[debugnik]

I've been telling myself I'll organise my now 4 layers nested stuff folders for 15 years.

A bit off-topic, but can anyone recommend tools to organise this much random stuff?

[clickety_clack]

You should only organize things as you actually use them. The things you use are then generally organized and you haven’t wasted a bunch of time organizing stuff you never use.

If you do decide to organize a bunch of stuff you never use, that decision is then totally aesthetic, so you should choose a method of doing it that you find aesthetically pleasing.

Source: obsidian user who spent a bunch of time organizing stuff he never uses.

[debugnik]

I largely agree, that's why I've still got all of it stored away, but I guess I'd like to keep track of what is it that I'm not using, what can I delete and what can I deduplicate.

[rkomorn]

Not the answer you're looking for, I know, but I used to have 100+ labels/folders, 4-5 deep, and decade+ old emails, obsessively organized etc.

5 years ago, I dropped down to 20 labels, and started routinely deleting anything over 5 years old except for a specific "keep forever" label.

No regrets. No instances of searching for old items and not finding them, etc.

[qwertox]

I moved my old pc into a vm. The vm is the new folder.

[saghm]

I moved my SSD from my old computer into my new one. Because I'm a masochist who manually sets up my partitions with custom labels, it literally worked the first time I booted it. (The only change I did was swapping to the AMD microcode from the Intel microcode because of the processor in my new machine being different). When upgrading SSDs, I just replicated the same partition structure on the new disk and copied everything over with rsync, which also "just worked".

I still can't decide whether these strategies are obvious and intuitive or if they go against literally everything I've learned about what should be feasible. Can't argue with the results though!

[qwertox]

I had to leave Windows 7 and start using Windows 11.

[_factor]

If only you could mount a separate home folder that stuck along while you changed roots. One can only dream..

[m463]

I once had a mac laptop and figured out how to get macos running under proxmox.

I was able to boot macos in a VM and migrate my laptop. It "ascended" into virtuality.

[m463]

You need to solve the migration strategy from stones and sticks to first desktop.

[yesfitz]

I'm an unrepentent "neither".

Trash, Archive, Folders in Folders, Tags, forget it!

Where is it? In the Inbox. If it's unread, I need to do something, if it's read, I don't.

Although if my clients start to slow down, I will export and delete the oldest year from my personal email. So I guess I do technically archive. But only in bulk and begrudgingly.

[jcul]

Yup, another inbox only user here. Unread means it's a to-do.

In Gmail you can set it to group all unread at the top.

Sometimes I'll open an email and mark unread again if I need to come back to it.

[dinkleberg]

I’m in the same camp. Unread vs read is all I need. Also it’s funny when I’m with someone from the “inbox zero” camp and they get stressed seeing my 6-figure inbox count.

[rezonant]

I was inbox-only since GMail was in beta, and received tons of email notifications and extraneous mail over that 20 year period that didn't get read.

My inbox was at about 100k _unread_ emails with about 280k total.

I am happy to say I am now at inbox-zero (ish).

[hdjrudni]

Impressive. I've also been using gmail since beta. I'm only at 27,980 unread.

[BeetleB]

> If it's unread, I need to do something, if it's read, I don't.

What if you read an email, and need to do something, but can't do it right now? Do you mark it as unread so you can deal with it later?

I did that for years. Thankfully no longer!

[yesfitz]

Exactly so. If I'm going to do anything with it later, I'll have to read it again anyway.

It's self-culling with time. I've got unread messages deep down on the list. Things that I wanted to do something about months ago, but never did, and they weren't important enough to come up again. And if they ever do come up again, I can see that I received a message and didn't do anything with it.

[rezonant]

And then while checking your email you mindlessly click it and realize its the one you have "snoozed" by marking it unread, so you need to mark it unread again.

Rinse, repeat

[BeetleB]

Yes - that was Hell.

Now I have a keystroke that will automatically create a TODO with a link to the message. I hit the keystroke and then archive so it no longer shows up in my inbox.

There are lots of poor productivity books/hacks, but the "Do not treat your inbox as a TODO list" has stood the test of time.

[dmje]

Terribly triggered by this

[toast0]

Sorry, but unless I can manage my email with sensible rules, I'm not going to manage it.

I need to be able to have rules that let me move email automatically after it's been read or after it's been in the Inbox for some time. But that's not really possible with most server side rules engines (they only look at mail when it arrives), client side rules engines are dead and I don't use email from a fixed desktop machine anyway, and I'm not going to write an imap based filtering engine (I did it once on company equipment, and it wasn't fun enough to do it again).

So Inbox 40,000 it is.

[mpolichette]

I've recently started writing an app intended for a raspberry pi that uses IMAP to automate this exact thing.

The goal is for it to apply the rules and followup with actions while still letting me interact with my email from any client I want.

[isaachinman]

A rules engine is our primary next focus at Marco. What you're describing is exactly the way email should work.

https://marcoapp.io

[toast0]

If you need more inspiration, I used to use Pegasus Mail, and I'd have a small number of filters on Inbox open: there were some lists I was on that didn't need to ever be in the inbox, and most of my filters on Inbox close: move read or timed out mail into folders it belonged; read mail with no other rule would end up in Archive/YYYY-qQ; I found quarterly was the best granularity, monthly archive folders were too fiddly. But modal flow like that isn't very current.

Pegasus Mail was very good when it owned the mail (pop3), and works ok with a competent IMAP server, but work switched to Exchange and it was very slow, and Pegasus didn't work well with a slow IMAP server. That was the start of my slide into inbox 40k :(

[isaachinman]

Check out our product. I'm also a "leave everything in inbox" kind of user.

I've got 100k+ threads in my inbox and full text search is single digit ms.

IMAP search itself is unusable. SQLite on the other hand...

https://marcoapp.io

[nickm12]

That's just Archive with fewer steps

[rpgbr]

Chaotic neutral here.

[josefritzishere]

I am that person.