Email communication breakdown?

Communication breakdown,
It's always the same,
I'm having a nervous breakdown,
Drive me insane!

in "Communication Breakdown" by Led Zeppelin



Do you get this feeling when you're handling your email? I know I did.

Then I decided to change the way I worked with email using a Google-inspired approach: "archive and use search instead of spending a lot of time storing the messages meticulously in specific folders".

My current email folders are the following:
Inbox
My Mail
Mailing Lists

That's right! Just three!
'Inbox' has the new arrivals that I haven't read or handled yet. 'My Mail' holds all my messages. 'Mailing Lists' holds messages not specifically for me but that I'm interested in keeping. Mail can be directly stowed in Mailing Lists using filters.

When you want to look up a specific mail message, just use your program's search capabilities to retrieve it quickly! (e.g. Thunderbird's search capabilities are very good).

But doesn't this mean that the 'My Mail' and 'Mailing Lists' keep growing indefinitely? Yes, it does. This is why we need one more time: archives.

My archives folders look like this:

Archives
|-My Mail Archive
|-2005
|-2006
|-2007
|-Mailing Lists Archive
|-2005
|-2006
|-2007

Archiving is easy and is done once a year.

For me this email scheme works great. Do you want to give it a try?