Right on.

I stopped using folders to manage my personal email years ago. I have an Inbox folder, a Sent Messages folder, a Saved Messages folder, and a Follow-up folder for messages that will require more than a few minutes to address properly.

I use advanced search features to dig up old messages. In my experience, using folders to organize messages is the wrong way to go. If you rely heavily on folders to organize your messages, as opposed to using search features to find messages, you’re much more likely to miss messages because you’re relying on your organizational skills to file messages as opposed to the computers ability to find messages based on search criteria. Additionally, advanced search features, can do a much better job of making full use of the rich meta data in in your email or document to find the right messages.

Tags are a great way to add additional meta data to an email messages. Email Center Pro (ECP) makes it easy to tag messages and internally we rely on the tagging methodology heavily to add an extra level of rich meta data to the message that can be searched for at some point in the future. For example, we tag all emails from ECP customers that include a feature suggestions “feature request” to speed our search for these types of messages in the future – it works really well, especially in ECP.

ECP makes it really easy to used the advanced search feature to build some really interesting searches. ECP 2.0 also makes it really easy to save a search that you build for future use – we call these Saved Searches.

If you really get good at using search to find things you’ll soon be tossing your folders because they start to get in the way of using search.

– Cale

Senior Vice President, Product Development
Palo Alto Software Inc.