Honest Question

[singedsun]

How do you organize or keep your emails? For what emails you might still get that is.

Like for shopping and stuff... do you keep the first email? If the company sends you shipping notices do you keep those too? What about the email when the package is received? Do you keep it or trash it? Do you organize them at all - like if you use gmail do you use labels? If you write fanfiction or engage in comments somewhere do you organize those? Keep those? What about DW post comments?

For me, my personal email is gmail. Within it, I use labels and archiving heavily. I also keep mine in compact view, use stars to keep the immediate things like stuff I'm not ready to read: meeting links, patreon or kickstarter updates/downloads. I also have mine stacked by importance so it's Starred / Important / Everything else. I keep all my AO3 kudos/comments emails (IDK why I just like them). I also almost always keep my DW comment response emails (you are immortalized in my email).

Do you just leave all your emails piled in one place without organization and just use the search if you need something? Do you never check your email unless you absolutely need something?

I'm honestly so curious.

Comments

[sideways]

[sweats] Great big pile and search function. I don't star things. I don't flag things. I just rifle through the abyss.

I keep my AO3 emails, but delete my DW comments. No real reason. Maybe if I got more of the former I'd delete those too.

[singedsun]

I am FASCINATED by people living in disorderly chaos gmail email mode. I get it from a modern tech perspective, searching is functionally just as easy as selecting labels, but visually I like the hierarchical structure of having important things on top and labels so I kind of know what it is before I open it.

[rionaleonhart]

All my emails live together forever in a beautiful, unorganised mess. I read everything as soon as it comes in, and I almost never delete anything. If I'll need to deal with an email at some point, I'll start a reply (just typing a couple of letters), so I can go into my drafts folder to find whatever needs to be done.

[singedsun]

Oooh, I like this idea of starting replies so you don't lose things kind of idea. I barely ever use my drafts, but that's a great way to organize things you need to reply to.

[misura]

For shopping, I keep all e-mails in an [events in progress] folder until I've received the package, after which I delete all of them except the order confirmation which I move to [save forever], because I might want to check later where I bought something, what size I bought, what the item was called and so on.

I don't use gmail, so I mostly use folders: [save forever], [receipts], [events in progress], [stuff I need to do something with at some nebulous point in the future] and [Inbox, aka stuff I have 48 hours to reply to or else it's too late and I'm going to feel awkward about replying so late and I don't want that do I].

Comment emails stay in my inbox, but once I've replied I delete them to save myself from rereading them and coming up with a funnier/better reply than the one I made x weeks later keep my inbox feeling nice and tidy. Yup. Definitely just for my own sense of tidiness.

[singedsun]

Do you use rules at all to keep things foldered/labeled in your inbox? I have several, especially for bills or patreon or kickstarter emails. So I already know what things are before I open them if the subject isn't descriptive enough.

As for DW comments, I keep them all immortalized in my inbox (unless it's like a one word 'yeah' or 'me too' kind of reply), but I use the inbox on DW itself to remind me what I have and haven't replied to. And then I delete them from there when I have replied (or know I don't need to reply).

[misura]

Oh! Completely forgot but yes, though I only use rules for messages from mailing lists, each of which has their own folder.

I check my personal mailbox once a day and there's usually something like 5-20 messages to deal with, which feels manageable. I also kind of like the 'surprise' of not knowing exactly what's waiting for me, so I don't 'spoil' myself in advance by sorting them further. I've also been kind of trained to keep an uncluttered Inbox, so I find it useful to have all messages (except from MLs) enter there so if fe there's anything wrong with a bill or receipt, I catch it fairly quickly.

Using the Inbox on DW ... I keep forgetting that's a thing, oops! At this point, I guess I'm just too set in my ways to start using that one. (I've got the one on the AO3 switched off, too.)

[eglantiere]

for personal email, i use gmail with auto-filters: name filters for specific people, and grouped network:ao3/dw/ff.net filters for comments, likes etc.i delete everything else as it arrives and i read it.

for work gmail, where all the subscriptions, purchase notifications etc go, i just use search and delete everything that i'm not going to read more than once. if i need a specific thing, i use search.

[nyctanthes]

I have two separate personal email (gmail) accounts: one for fan stuff and writing, and one for the rest of it. I never archive, put stuff in folders, etc. I just search within gmail when I want to find something.

In terms of my fandom/writing email account, I don't keep much. AO3 comments, DW comments, etc. all get erased. I use it a lot to send myself writing and research reminders when I think of them in the middle of the day/night.

I also have a separate yahoo email account for online ordering. It's where all the marketing emails go to die.

[singedsun]

I also have a yahoo email where things go to die. I check it occasionally try to unsubscribe it from things or if I realize I want the email, I use it to go to whatever that thing is and change my email address so it goes to my gmail.

[lavenderspark]

My main email has folders for everything I keep. Bill payment confirmations, book lists, school info, etc. As far as order shipments, the email lives in my inbox until the item is received.

I have a Gmail account for fandom type things, but I haven't found an option for folders? I would love to know how that works!

[singedsun]

So gmail doesn't use what we think of as traditional "folders". It has what they call "labels". Labels function essentially as folders, except when you label something it doesn't disappear from your inbox. It still sits there, but your sidebar has all your labels, so you can still select into a label just like you can a traditional folder. If you use the "archive" function within gmail it will keep it's label but move it out of the inbox (like foldering something would). I find it pretty useful.

[lavenderspark]

Hmm. I might have to do some investigating. I don't like everything just living in my inbox.

[enemytosleep]

Hm, I never thought about it before, but honestly I just leave them all until I balance statements (so once a month I will go through and clean emails about orders and client payments, etc).

[lassarina]

I delete all DW comments, AO3 comments, etc. notifications as soon as I've replied....in the case of AO3 comments sometimes that takes months, oof. Shopping stuff I'll try to remember to delete the old notification when the new one comes in, and the whole caboodle once I've confirmed the item is here and whole. Stuff like grubhub/paypal notifications goes in the bin as soon as I've confirmed it's accurate to what I did. I've started keeping my log of "stuff to read" in Notion rather than my email, where it's....minimally more likely to be handled.

I also can't abide having unread emails, so if there's that one thing I just GOTTA do I will mark the email unread (or send myself an email that I don't read) so it sits there and HARASSES ME until the thing is done.

[necrophilia]

I keep e-mails as I need them. Like, shopping for example - when I get an order confirmation, I keep it in my inbox until I get a shipping notification. Then, depending on how secure I am in the retailer, I either delete or archive the original order confirmation. If I get an updated shipping notification, I usually only keep the most recent one. Deleting vs. archiving in gmail is a pretty significant decision for me: am I going to want or need the e-mail later? If so, I keep it.

Starring is for very important e-mails. The most recent example I have is my flight itinerary for my December trip, which was both starred and left in my inbox until about a week after I had come back. I rarely bother to un-star e-mails I archive. Too lazy.

Generally, I leave things in my inbox until they're obsolete. So DW comments don't get archived/deleted until I either reply to them or decide I don't actually feel like replying to them, appointment reminders don't get deleted until after the appointment (usually about four days after, I only sit down with my e-mail account about once a week), or... just stuff that stays until I have the bandwidth to acknowledge it.

This is what my gmail inbox looks like halfway into my weekly acknowledgment. The single starred e-mail is a very swank hotel offering me a discount, holla!!

[senmut]

Purchases - keep order receipt, then shipping notices until all arrived, trash.

AO3 - gets its own label and I keep until I read, then trash.

Receipts for purchases - archived.

Not real consistent on correspondence being trashed or archived.

[dolorosa_12]

I use Outlook for both work and personal emails (different accounts obviously). I briefly used Gmail for a while, but I found its lack of option to file things in folders really didn't suit my needs, and the 'labels' option wasn't a good replacement.

I have an extremely elaborate folder system in all email accounts that I use — I file everything according to their subject in the appropriate folder, and try to keep the general inbox fairly empty. I don't keep every single email in a conversation — I usually go through and delete earlier emails if a new one in the same conversation comes through. Regarding shipping notifications, I only keep them until the item has been received, then I delete them. But I keep every receipt and invoice forever, in case some kind of dispute about payment should ever arise.

I have two separate personal email accounts — one that I use for friends, family, and signing up with social media, one that I use on more official contexts (paying for things, administrative stuff, anything that involves my real-life identity and/or money). I like to keep all things like that firmly separated, particularly keeping emails associated with social media logins firmly cordoned off from anything involving money or personal data.

Both my personal email accounts I've held for close to 20 years at this point, and the 'life admin' one has documents/payment records/payslips for old jobs going back for that whole time. It's actually been a life-saver in several complex and complicated administrative situations, and my file organisation system is such that it's really easy for me to immediately locate important documents quickly.

My setup suits me well, because I'm generally an organised person, an anxious person who worries about admin stuff going elaborately wrong and takes precautions to avoid this, and a person who hates digital clutter so needs an email organisation system thtat does not involve a perpetually clogged inbox.

[hazyl]

I'm an archivist/records manager by profession, so I am ridiculously organized. I get hundreds of emails a day, but only retain a very small percentage in my inbox that require addressing beyond replying. If I reply to something then the original email gets deleted unless it's got a retention requirement for me to archive it. If all my email inboxes are up to date, I strive to keep them all under 20 messages each. The only things that are in there are pending/action items that were not addressed by replying. The rest of my emails are all sorted by required retention times. And by "sorted," I mean, it's either archived or deleted. At work, they purge all of our emails automatically after 2 years, then we have an email archive we can search if we ever need to find old ones. At home, I'll periodically review my email archives and weed out the ones that no longer need to be kept. That's it.

[glassfinger]

I am like a babe in the woods when it comes to gmail. I have deleted many, many unnecessary emails, but still I have more than five hundred of the little blighters in my inbox! Perhaps I need a gmail tutorial, to show me how to organise them, and be ruthless with old ones.