Managing My E-mail

It’s often said that the first step to resolving a problem is admitting that there is a problem. So…I admit it. I’m an e-mail packrat. I have e-mail in PSTs going back over a decade covering four different companies.

What’s the value of that, you ask? Well, most of the time, all this information does is consume disk space. However, from time to time, I come up with those rare gems that make it all worthwhile. Consider the eight-year-old e-mail from my ex-wife which proved… anyway. Of more significant business value is the history I have maintained with companies over the last decade and the institutional knowledge that is preserved with those various e-mail documents. I also use this resource for networking with other information professionals and building better business relationships. Overall, it’s invaluable to me.

However, this comes at a cost – I literally have to manage my e-mail. Otherwise, the pure size and number of documents in my personal e-mail archive would be overwhelming. Over the years I have developed some techniques:

I separate e-mail into four large categories (and thus folders in my mailbox): Personal, Companies, People, and Mailing Lists. The last category may seem a little odd, but I’m very active in a number of e-mail based mailing lists – I archive the contents of those that I think are interesting and that I believe I may one day have a use for.
Within each of the large categories, I create a subfolder for each individual item. That is, for People for example, I create a subfolder for each person that I correspond with. I specifically use “last-name, first-name” for filing, but that’s just for consistency sake. For each company, I create a subfolder named for that company.
At the beginning of each year, I create another subfolder within each individual item for the prior year and move the prior year’s emails into that subfolder. Note that I started doing this back when Outlook got really slow when there were more than about a thousand items in a folder. With Outlook 2007 and above, this is really not an issue any longer.
Items that need action get marked for follow-up. They stay in my Inbox until they are complete. If I need to do something not based on an e-mail, I send myself an e-mail so that my ToDo list is all in one place. Note that some people really like the Tasks capability of Outlook and if that works for you – I say go for it. Each person will need to figure out what is best for them. When projects grow large, I leave a tickler e-mail in Outlook and create a project plan using Microsoft Project.
Finally, I index EVERYTHING. All of this information is of no value if it can’t be found. Windows Search 4.0 is great tool – now. Before it was around, I used third party add-ins such as Xobni and LookOut to be able to access and search my piles of data.

Now, as an individual consultant, this all works great. With Outlook in cached mode, all of my mailbox data is also on my laptop and I can search, index, find, report, etc. etc. However, for a company with more than one person, this solution really doesn’t scale. You need tools that can hold a corporate archive and do many-mailbox searches and reports, not just for business intelligence but also for compliance and legal reasons. Exchange Server 2010, which has gone to the RTM milestone today, has some of those capabilities. However, for a fully featured and robust solution, you should investigate solutions outside of Microsoft itself.