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OSX: How the heck do people approach email? Specifically, OSX "Mail" in this case. And, where did record album art go?
Tue, 27 Mar 2007

I think I must be missing something extremely obvious; thats entirely plausible given my current state of mind. If I am, let me know :) My question is -- if you have more than a few mailboxes, say a couple dozen or even hundreds, how do you file your mail? Drag and drop seems rediculous in this situation. (Mailboxes could be by author of email, or by project, or by whatever criterion. I use author, but for the following you can sub in whatever splitting technique you use.)

Asides: 1) This was sunroof-day, the first day of the year where I opened up our sunroof for a drive. Course, we bought the car in winter, so this was a cool occasion. 2) Where did album art go? you remember on records and such, where you'd have a painted cover by Roger Dean or the like?

Background for the question:

I'm considering switching to Mac Mail for some email activities; I'm for sure sticking to my existing mail package (Unix Pine if you must know) for a lot of other activities. Both use IMAP so I can keep all my mail physically located in one place regardless of which tool I use to manage any given message. Cool stuff, and as it should be for a cross platform developer. But in setting up Mac Mail ("Mail" hereafter), I find myself seeking one particular feature that just seems a super obvious requirement for everyone.. yet its missing. Obviously everyone else has a different workflow to me.. yet I'm surprised :) Being a developer and not a user does make one different, but for email.. we're all users, right?

I keep 'unprocessed' email in the inbox; I may have read a given message and not acted upon it yet, but still need it in the inbox. Eventually I file it. In my existing mail package, I just hit 's' to save the mail, and the default location is (configured from a menu item in the mail application) a mailbox named after the source email address -- one key and a return and I'm off to the next email. Example: If I'm reading an email from fooblorb@generic.com and hit the save key, it goes to 'fooblorb' unless I indicate otherwise. Nice and easy -- hit 's' and 'return', done. No fuss, no mess. This was the norm for dozens of email applications not that long ago.

With Mail you've got an Inbox; I can read email in it, and save them to a folder by drag and drop or a menu that lists folder to drop the message into. Well and good.. if you've got maybe 10 friends. If you've got 1890 folders in one account like I do, good luck scrolling 3/4 down to drop an email off a few times a day. Seems like a flawed UI .. drag and drop, and scrolly lists, just don't work for more than a handful of values. (Yes, I can trim down the folder count, but the problem remains.. I'm sure lots of people know more than 20 or 30 people .. and having to manually seek a text item from a list is never really fast to us poor humans. This is why in 'pick a country' lists in a web browser, they usually put a Canada and US option at the top.. seeking down to find US every time would annoy the hell out of you.)

Some options present themselves, but not well: Set up a 'rule' so that mails can filed to folders based on author. Great, but then they've not in the inbox anymore .. so you search through lots of folders to find all new mail.. silly workflow. After setting that up, you could set up a new virtual inbox that is a saved query, showing 'unread' mail say. Course, I like to read and then re-read and reply later, so thats unworkable as well since my inbox would be losing emails as I read them, not as I file them. I could try and manage with little flags and colours, but lets get serious -- in Pine, elm, mutt, gnus, and other older email packages you just hit the save key, and you're done. Perhaps some rules can be 'automatic', and others 'manual', but again.. we're getting pretty fiddly, for what amounts to 'one key' in other applications.

I do realize the idea of having conversations spread across multiple mailboxes by author-of-individual-message is antiquated, but it was also mega common, and works fine. (I can search by thread if I want to.. but for me, I 99% of the time search by person, or whole conversation is with one person. Most email for me is not amongst 10 people at once, but a one on one. I'm betting the same is true for most conversations.) Since I'm setting up across IMAP, I expect Mail to work to the existing system, not require me to import gigabytes of email and rework the storage just for it.

I'm betting theres some cool AppleScript solution, but I also know this same problem is present in many other current email applications. They tend to assume one big database, or some other organization scheme, and you adjust to fit their usage and use search views. Or perhaps most people have only a dozen mailboxes at a time, I dunno. I prefer applications that bend to my usage however, not the reverse :) I've been trained by these old apps, and I like my system like an old codger. I know I've been doing email for some 20 years or more and am a little set in my ways.. but how can I be the only one? :) And yes yes I know, few people get as much email as I do :)

I would think that if most people file-by-rule at all, and thus must use a virtual inbox that shows 'recent' email, it would be a default-on feature. So it makes me wonder.. how do most people manage their email? And more to point.. how can I bend these tools to my will?

At work I manually file every email .. by project, or to the trash after awhile. It makes sense for work since theres only maybe 10 projects at any given time and a few dozen over the year so I can sub-folder to save having to see more than a few at once. I don't want to manually file every email at home.. It should be as easy as a rule that applies only when you fire it off, and it should be a regular expression (or AppleScript?) to guess the mailbox name. Like we've been doing for 20 years in other applications.

I'm certain this had been done to death; any Mac nerds have a pointer for me?

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