Email Archiving – Managing Folders

One thing that has changed dramatically over the last 40 years has been the development of email. With the first email being sent in 1971 one thing is for sure; things have certainly changed since then! Along with emails becoming so popular, there are some downsides to this level of connectivity that has been afforded by the advent of email.

1.      The shear volume of emails that are sent and received every day

Many people have a love-hate relationship with email. The means of being able to communicate with a wide variety of people in one email is a definite plus if the communication is valuable. Unfortunately, just like snail-mail has become deluged with junk mail, so has email. A lot of time is wasted everyday reviewing emails that have little or no value whatsoever. In some instances these emails can contain harmful viruses that are exceptionally damaging to your computer system.

The time it takes to delete these emails is also just a waste of time and energy. Many simply don’t delete these emails and they wind-up as part of their email archives. Having to sort through all of these emails later to either clean-up the mess or to be able to find the important emails that you were looking for consumes far more time than it should.

2.      Managing your email inbox by moving emails to folders

Just like one can easily forget which physical file cabinet they stored those “important hardcopy sales contracts” in, one can easily become confused about where they moved that important email explaining the terms of the same “important sales contract” stored in their email archives. Developing email folders is just like defining file cabinets. One needs to have a system that they can understand time after time or additional time will be wasted looking through folder after folder for the exact email that one is looking for. Many email providers have worked to improve their search methods over the years, but knowing where to start looking is always the best option when looking through your email archives.

3.      Think departmentally when creating folders

Creating folders to manage your email archiving efforts requires some thought. To setup a separate folder up for each individual that contacts you is not a good solution as you would wind-up with hundreds of folders to try to manage. To simply have one extra large folder to put everything into isn’t the answer for email archiving either as searching through thousands of emails just isn’t an effective option.

One method that many find to be a successful way of finding a happy medium for email archiving is to think departmentally. Is the communication regarding a design engineering issue? Then store it in a folder named Engineering. Sales oriented? Look in your folder titled Sales. Archiving by folders designed to represent functional departments in your organization should give you at lest a fighting chance at finding that communication regarding benefit packages if you look in your Human Resources folder. Of course one can define subsets within the primary folders as well, but the more nested things become, the more difficult it is to recall all of the specifics related to your filing system.