i iterated through various flows to try to find the one that matches my needs.

i use emails for a few things.

• The usual messaging system
• The shitty commercial email handling (e.g. account management, ads, etc)
• The project-tracking

i find e-mails a particularly useful, offline-compatible tool for taking note of my ideas, writings, projects, etc.

The now

i do have a good anti-spam system catching almost the entirety of my spam so my mailbox is mostly uneventful even though i share my e-mail addresses a lot and have a lot of open accounts here and there. Having virtually no spam makes it a much more pleasurable experience than for some of my peers.

My current flow is to delete every single e-mail i receive once the topic is cleared. By this, i mean “once i do not need to give a single bit of attention to this topic / conversation / issue”.

For example, right now my mailbox contains, among some other notes, two big projects.

• A car purchase
• A special medical appointment that needs some serious planning

Keeping those projects in my e-mails also allows me to be able to, at a glance, check what have been left on the side for too long.

for those who had the chance to never deal with medical or administrative stuff, a single stupid appointment may take months or even years to be set up; sometimes even to receive a simple “no can do” answer to a first request.

So i keep the e-mail threads in my inbox, and once i’m done with them (the appointment was taken or finished, the purchase was done, some legal matter has been cleared, etc), i simply delete them.

For e-mails related to legally-binding topics, i might save the entire e-mail (.eml) at once and archive it alongside the rest of whatever that email was referencing.

The before

Since my previous e-mails host also manages my calendar, and since their website is well-done, i was able to keep track of both of them under the same interface making it very comfortable to use, so this tab was always my open-by-default tab on my computer.

For the e-mails containing ideas, information, etc, i used to take some time when on my computer to open my personal wiki and move that knowledge over there, rendering the e-mails unneeded. At some point between then and now i stopped maintaining such a wiki and dropped this reflex.

The more before

i tried two archiving models:

• A unique “archive” folder where i would move every cleared topic
• An “archive” folder per year (e.g. “archive/2022”, “archive/2021”, etc)

Using it was easy on desktop and a pain on mobile, but it worked. It allowed me to keep my inbox mostly empty.

Then at some point i took a look at the 5-6k e-mails i had archived, and realized that even if i ignore the commercial e-mails, almost every single e-mail was either useless, tasteless, or was only kept for the info it contained.

The even before

i tried classifying my e-mails using folders; family stuff, legal stuff, entertainment stuff, etc.

i ended up with a cluster of unneeded e-mails, and constantly hit my head on how to classify e-mails who did fit into multiple categories.

The even even before

i kept everything in my inbox, an endless stream of e-mails, which definitely doesn’t work when my mailbox was already packing a cute amount of 5k emails.

Backups

My current automated email archival is done using mbsync to pull emails into a local folder path which is then encrypted and backed up using restic. Since restic is snapshot/diff-based and does some deduplication, repeatedly running a backup action doesn’t change anything on the size of the backup repository so i’ve made it run multiple times a day to try to avoid losing as many emails as i can.

i used to have some automated e-mail backup cron using getmail, which i documented on my tech blog, but it pulled everything from my e-mail server, indiscriminately, including commercial shit and spam. It was too much of a burden and i had no easy way to browse or filter them, so i dropped it.