Comments on: You've definitely got mail

By: Sue

Sue — Mon, 24 May 2004 18:32:34 +0000

I used to keep every letter (excluding spam of course), I kept quite organized and I was so proud of it. I had about 800Mb of letters when I lost all my mail. Guess how disappointed I was. I was so surprised when I realized a couple of weeks later that I needed only some latest letters… Now I have “a cleaning day” once a month when I delete old letters and save most important ones to a separate folder.

By: Christine

Christine — Sat, 24 Apr 2004 10:05:32 +0000

And here I was thinking my 360 e-mails in two days for 1 e-mail was horrible. Won’t count up all 7 e-mail accounts though. I promise…I won’t ever complain again as I sort them.

And yes, I archive into folders, and have folders within folders to keep organized. 8~}

By: mark

mark — Wed, 21 Apr 2004 12:06:29 +0000

Ive just lost all of my email – so i have the exact oposite experience…

By: Brian Warren

Brian Warren — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 19:01:24 +0000

Mondo – Ever tried zoe? It might do what you want. Seems pretty nifty to me.

http://zoe.nu

By: Mondo Dynamo

Mondo Dynamo — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 18:24:04 +0000

Have you ever thought of using one application to receive the email, and another to store archived mail? My problem is similar but different in the respect that I get a flood of email daily. It doesn’t all need reading but it does need archiving in a searchable format. Take a look at the figures in these screenshots…

The email flood screenshots.

…and you will see what I mean. If anyone knows of a good email archive / searchable store app then please let me know. I’d love to use it to get these numbers down!

By: Douglas Bowman

Douglas Bowman — Sun, 18 Apr 2004 22:55:48 +0000

Interesting calculations Jorge. Except that the number (27K) doesn’t represent all the email I have stored. It only represents the mailboxes I had previously never viewed in Mail, so Mail hadn’t indexed those mailboxes yet. Those were the only messages marked as unread.

In reality, I estimate that my actual count of messages stored in Mail is 4 or 5 times that amount. But without some type of statistics report within Mail, I really have no idea.

Thanks for the math though…

By: Jorge Laranjo

Jorge Laranjo — Sun, 18 Apr 2004 19:54:40 +0000

Interesting…
Note my calcs…
1996 – 366 days
2000 – 366 days
2004 – 366 days
But you posted in 14 april 2004
From 01 january to 14 april goes 105 days
5 years * 365 days = 1825 days
1996 year days + 2000 year days + 105 days = 837
Lets sum everything…
1825+837 = 2662 days

you have 27385 emails

27385 / 2662 = 10,2 emails/day
You store about 10 mails each day…
Interesting :D

By: Karl

Karl — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 19:50:16 +0000

with regards to Email volume, my 12 years of mail in my Apple Mail app counts like:

12 years
150 000 messages
1.6 Gb of mails
Around 1200 folders
26.000 individual email adresses

luckily enough I have my own server

By: Doug

Doug — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 17:21:52 +0000

Ah, thanks Paul. I forgot about MailEnhancer, which I'm definitely using. I find it handy to have the red "badge" (as I should have called it) display a count for all mailboxes since I have several Rules in place to filter messages to different boxes. Even if there are no unread messages in my In box, I might still have new mail in other boxes.

By: Paul Nishikawa

Paul Nishikawa — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 17:10:56 +0000

I came across the same thing when I moved from Entourage to Mail, back when I was trying to go all OS X and Office X hadn’t been released.

Now, with the Panther version of Mail, a simple right-click on the offending mailbox and at the bottom of the menu you can select “mark all as read”… i like that one, especially for my mailing lists mailbox which I don’t read as much as I should.

As for the “full count” in the dock icon, I use a Mail plug-in called “MailEnhancer” to enable that. Don’t know if that’s what Doug uses…

By: Kevin Conboy

Kevin Conboy — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 16:23:13 +0000

sorry for the double comment. Didn’t read the first comment thoroughly. didn’t mean to repeat. :)

By: Kevin Conboy

Kevin Conboy — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 16:22:18 +0000

Command-A, Message->Mark as Read. (Or Command-Shift U)

By: Michael Heilemann

Michael Heilemann — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 15:25:14 +0000

I heard of a guy who had grown tired of the QWERTY keyboard layout and wanted to make his own, customized for his personal usage. Having archived all the mail he had ever written as well as all the code and what not, he pulled it all into a small program that he had made for the purpose. And analysing all this text, the program figured out which keys had seen the most use and which had seen the least, allowing him to make a 100% optimized keyboard layout.

Some geeks huh?…

(I of course only have my as far back as December last year, so I can’t do that :()

By: Brent

Brent — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 15:16:37 +0000

That is interesting that it displays the count from what I assume is all your folders combined. My dock icon currently sits at 32, but that is for only the inbox. I have several other sub folders for different listservs with over 12000 in one and 8000 in another but they don’t show up on the dock icon badge.

hmmm…

By: James 'Smiler' Farrer

James 'Smiler' Farrer — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 14:02:21 +0000

Do you really need e-mail from 7 years ago? Are you archiving for the sake of archiving?

How many of those 27,000 messages are actually useful?

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 12:18:47 +0000

If you use iChat, you could always install the very excellent iChatStatus which can, amongst other things, display a live count of your unread messages or junk messages as your iChat status. And it's free!

By: beto

beto — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 02:38:02 +0000

I’m not very good at the habit of archiving old email (read: more than two years) not is something I sweat a lot, actually. If I really wanted to archive a message, a paper copy is more secure in my case.

At this time, my unread Mail (yeah, the OS X app) messages go through 150 and counting. Slowly but surely “getting there”… Not something I’m exactly proud of :S

By: Keith

Keith — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 02:30:39 +0000

YIKES.

Glad I’ve never had that problem. Then again, I don’t keep e-mail. I’ve always said your best friend when it comes to e-mail management is the “delete” key. Second best? Cell phone.

Works for me, but I’m quite sure it’s not for everyone. I’m pretty low tech when it comes to some things. E-mail. Urls…

By: Plush

Plush — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 01:34:12 +0000

I can see how that would be a problem. I pretty much started over with email when I moved up to OS X a few years ago, but after a few weeks of not using a computer (I set up my accounts on a few computers between home and work) it can sometimes add up to a few hundred.

One thing I can’t live without now, though, it Mails great Junk filter, and labeler. Saves a ton of time.

By: Doug

Doug — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 00:23:01 +0000

Dave: I’ve cut back on using multiple mailboxes/folders too. But I’ve still got 7 years of email that’s stored in tons of different folders. I wasn’t about to go back and suck all that into one folder, even an archived folder.

During HotWired and Lycos days, there was a mailbox for every different product or service, and a some co-workers sent out so much email, they got their own box too. I was box-happy, and I’ve always been a hierarchical organization freak.