There has been a lot of discussion round the office about how everyone manages email over the past couple of days. While the basic idea of email is pretty simple, the endless number of tricks people employ to wrangle their inboxes into a manageable state fascinates the ever-loving crap out of me. So I thought I’d share my tricks.

I’m a partial subscriber to Marilyn Mann’s inbox zero methodology. By partial, I mean I don’t really care about having zero messages in my inbox, but I do only turn on my email when I’m ready to go through and process all my new messages. By process, I mean put to-dos in my to-do list, put appointments in my calendar, respond to questions, and/or just plain do what I need to do so that I can delete the message and never think about it again; unless that message contains something I may want to hang on to, in which case I just leave it in my inbox after processing it. When I’m not processing my email, I quit my email program (I use Apple Mail to manage my 3 email accounts on all my computers via IMAP).

I don’t file emails into specific folders. Every email that I don’t delete, stays in my inbox. When I need to find something, Mail’s Spotlight search is 1000x more efficient for me than any amount of filing or color coding. To keep things easy on the eyes, I have a smart folder called Unread with a simple rule:

I use this Unread smart folder as my default email view. I read all of my messages in the preview pane, and have Organize by Thread enabled (this groups all messages by Subject). I keep my messages sorted by Date Received in descending order.

I also have two other smart mailboxes that I use less frequently:

• Flagged - all flagged messages in any mailbox
• Attachments - all messages with attachments in any mailbox

I’ve found that setting aside time to deal with and process email at regular intervals throughout the day has virtually eliminated my need to file or color code them in a way that makes them easier to find, simply for the fact that I have already dealt with them and no longer need to find them. When I do need to find something, a Spotlight query is simply faster than looking for colored subject line in multiple nested folders.

[Update] included some images.