Smart Folders aren’t very bright. Sorting by date or name doesn’t help either. Using another program (or collection of programs) to better organize email threads and collections is wasteful, time consuming, and requires too much manual effort for the workflow.
Lots of apps nowadays offer tagging and better organizational methods compared with most mail clients. I use Apple’s Mail.app, and though it’s a nice interface, it’s still just an email client application. Nothing more.
Smart Folders are dumb
Mail.app provides allows you to set up Smart Folders, which are supposed to be intelligent based on some rules you can define. However, these things aren’t that smart. They’re merely saved search queries. And the way the logical rules work, it’s easy to get either way too many messages displayed or an empty set.
If the logic were a bit more flexible, then smart folders would be better, but still they wouldn’t solve the problems. For example, you currently may set up a smart folder to display all messages that meet certain criteria, say sender’s address. But in reality senders often use multiple addresses. No problem, in theory, as you can assign multiple rules to the smart folder. However, either all your rules are ANDed together, or they’re ORed together. Which means you’ll end up either making an empty smart folder or you’ll get way too many messages in the folder. If we were able to group these logical rules in some fashion, then smart folders would be smarter, though still not smart enough.
Where are tags? Am I really supposed to use spotlight for everything?
Lots of people use Mac’s spotlight feature. I don’t. I never think to tag my files or folders in spotlight, and in fact, I’d have to do some research to even remember where I add tags and keywords to begin with.
So, my assessment of spotlight is that it’s impractical, at least for my daily use.
If Mail.app could use tags, then I’d be in much better shape. Tags offer a great, simple, and powerful way to organize messages and other data. If you’re careful when assigning tags, they can provide a great way for you to query your messages based on one or more keywords.
For example, you assign a tag of ‘to do’ to every message that’s not ready for archiving. Then you could simple click ‘to do’ and all your ‘to do’ messages would be displayed. But no, mail clients don’t offer this simple feature.
The right direction
Some mail interfaces are in the right direction. Gmail, for example, keeps on huge archive folder that stores all your mail. It allows you to use labels, which are essentially tags. However, when you IMAP or POP your messages into a mail client, these labels show up as simple old mail folders. Again, I’m stuck with nasty old way of organizing messages: a strict, hierarchical tree.
PIM (Personal Information Management) software allow for things called Collections. These collections are similar to smart folders, but they’re smarter. Of course, with PIMs, you can collect anything you want, based on how powerful the PIM is. But with mail clients, you can’t do this. You’ve got folders, and that’s it.
In my case, I receive lots of mail from my clients. Most clients are companies, and often these companies have multiple contacts, with each contact having a different email address. So using folders isn’t good enough for me, and smart folders, of course, aren’t smart enough.
Alternatives
For me a great alternative would be to use something like Sproutit’s Mailroom. I’ve tried this thing several times, and it’s great software. Works well, and I never had any complaints about it. I don’t currently pay for the service, as I’m accustomed to managing my clients’ mail messages in Mail and using a collection of notes and to do lists across multiple programs. But Mailroom is certainly a huge step in the right direction.
The future
I hope that soon Apple will release a much smarter, intuitive, and alternate take on how it can organize and display messages. Even tags, people. Even tags would dramatically help. And no, spotlight isn’t quite enough for me.