Hoarders vs. Deleters- What Your Inbox Says

BlueCup writes "You are your inbox. Take a clear-eyed look at how you answer or file each email. Notice what you choose to keep or delete. Consider your anxiety when your inbox is jammed with unanswered messages. The makeup and tidiness of your inbox is a reflection of your habits, your mental health and, yes, even the way Mom and Dad raised you." I always knew my obsessive packratting said something important about me as a human being.

Re:gmail solved my clutter

[MBCook]

Am I missing something here?

Yes.

You are using Mail.app and Spotlight (I do too) so you don't think gmail is so amazing.

But if you were to use another e-mail client for a while (AOL, Outlook, etc) you would realize just how TERRIBLE the average e-mail program's search ability is. It just doesn't work that well. Often, they search by (seemingly) walking though the e-mails one by one. Thus when you have 1000 e-mails searches take 10x as long as when you have 100. If you were to try to search through my backed e-mail (2-3 years) it would take a LONG time. Compare this to a fraction of a second to do the same with Spotlight (or gmail).

The live results and updates that Spotlight gives is what makes it so powerful.

Re:gmail solved my clutter

[nsayer]

Important Passwords

Those should really be stored as 'secure notes' in your keychain. That way at least they're stored encrypted and it requires your keychain password to get them.

Re:gmail solved my clutter

[SURsys]

There's absolutely nothing imaginary about deleting emails being criminal. This was a "finance executive" she advised to delete NINE THOUSAND emails. I work for a global insurance company that also has a huge financial branch. Along with certain sides of the insurance aspect of the company, the financial branch is also restricted by FEDERAL LAW that certain correspondence must be kept and archived (emails, phone conversations, all sorts of paperwork, etc etc etc). So, depending on what he deals in, it very well may be criminal to delete some of those nine thousand emails.

Err, what did you say was missing?

[Anonymous Coward]

> But I find search to be a little disappointing in Gmail,

What are you missing? There are lots of nice search operators for mail. It's better than the search on any other mail client I've used, at least.

> there is no spell checker , no suggested words, no word splitter /combiner

Err, there *IS* a spell checker, and it does suggest words--when you're composing an email, it's on the right hand side, just above the input box for the body of the email. Do you have JavaScript off or something? You are using the fancy web 2.0-y version, right? I have no idea what the splitter/combiner is, unless you mean that it suggests the correct "a lot" every time you type the non-word "alot" or something ...

Re:gmail solved my clutter

[barthrh2]

Check out copernic desktop. Adds Spotlight-like searching to everything, including email. I prefer the seamlessness of spotlight, but like the previews in Copernic. Plus, it's be best choice on Windows.

Re:gmail solved my clutter

[DeadPrez]

I don't know why the parent is modded so high when it has a major factual inaccuracy, namely a dictionary/word suggester. Yup, it could use some help and not care that words like "internet" don't need to be capitalized but that's neither here nor there.

Gmail = labels/filters + basically unlimited disk usage + search = My best experience with email since 1996. And I install Exchange for a (partial) living. shhh

Re:gmail solved my clutter

[hoggoth]

> restricted by FEDERAL LAW that certain correspondence must be kept and archived
> very well may be criminal to delete some of those nine thousand emails

Nice try.

If it's a federal law to keep emails, then the company's compliance department should be archiving all incoming and outgoing mails to an archive store, not depending on a desktop user to keep thousands of emails organized for years at a time.
I guarantee you any real "global insurance company" is complying with the data retention laws within the IT department, not by hoping each and every employee knows what to do in Outlook.

Re:gmail solved my clutter

[giorgiofr]

Uh? My Thunderbird holds about 1000 emails, yet the realtime search function (as in "filter while I type") is very realtime indeed. Maybe you're right, saying search time takes 10x as long as when I had 100: 10 x 0 sec = 0 sec.