[thechat] Inbox detox

[Mohan Arun L]

Ron, Simon, thanks for the insights!

Ron>>- I generally also keep a set of manually constructed 'archive index'
files on hand so >>I can easily determine that email and other files
relating to 'project A' can be found >>on discs 19, 20, and 37 while email
and other files relating to 'project B' can be >>found on discs 5, 13, and
14.

'easily' determine? :-)

>>If you have 10,000 mails in your folder I respectfully suggest that you
are
>>never going to read them all, and if you do they are probably irrelevant
by
>>now. Why don't you put them all into an archive file and start a new
regime
>>with a fresh clean empty inbox!

These are emails I've already read and attended to, I have just left them
hanging around in my inbox/allmail  'in case I need to refer them later'.

My ideal setup would be an evergrowing "personal wiki". I can create
wikified notebooks for each project - 'project A' notebook, 'project B'
notebook. When viewing an email pertaining to project A which I want to take
on my record, I select the pertinent paragraphs, right click and choose
option 'send to project A notebook' and it gets pasted there with sender
email id and date and time. Now you can take backup of project A notebook as
a single file, project B notebook as a single file and so on. When you need
to refer to something from project A you will know there is only one file
where that can be so you can open that wiki and search. I dont think any
current application does this kind of thing. So what I am doing is I copy
the text from those emails I think may be needed for later reference, and
create a note in Cintanotes. Then I export all of my notes into a single .db
or .xml file and copy to my external drive as backup in case my PC crashes.
Then I also copy the same file into Windows skydrive (25 GB free) in case my
external drive becomes unusable. It only takes up max 5 MB space compressed
because it is all text.

Mohan
www.mohanarun.com