Organizing Your E-Mail

Say you’ve been away from the internet for a few days (anything’s possible) and you come back to find your inbox completely flooded with messages and you don’t even know where to begin. Or you’re subscribed to quite a few mailing lists and the messages have just been piling up over the last few days. Or you’re really internet popular and everybody and their brother has been trying to get in touch with you about something “really important” since you’ve been gone, or whatever the reason. You’ve got to get this organized somehow.

There are a couple of different ways to get this done in the Mail app on the Mac. You could use Smart Folders to search for keywords, senders, subject lines, etc., and organize your mail that way. I don’t like doing this because instead of just reading the email and deciphering where it needs to go, your Mail application has to search through everything new every time you launch to try and find out where everything goes. This can be quite taxing on the hard drive, and that’s not what you want. To circumvent this issue, I set up Mailboxes (or folders, rather) in Mail, and then set up rules in the Rules preferences dialog box that correspond to those folders/mailboxes.

Like so:

You can also do something very similar to this using Thunderbird. So, if you’re in Linux or Windows, you can also have this same kind of convenience added to your mail application.