Ask HN: How do you organize your email?

This has been asked before but I’m inspired by a recent Ask HN on notetaking as well as the trend to migrate from gmail. I also recently migrated from gmail and the exercise of migration made me realize I hadn’t followed up on some important messages.

I used to put every email into folders for projects and topics, but it’s hard to stay on top of it and easy to forget an email once it’s moved. You can set up rules or filters but it’s also a burden.

So I stopped doing any sort of organization and relying on search. One on hand, I can always find an email if needed. But on the other hand I still forgot about an important one sometimes. Maybe more often since it’s harder to check “what is open on this project?”

Finally I adopted three folders aside from my inbox:

- archive: anything which doesn’t require an action from me is archived.

- follow-up: anything I should check on later, including sent mails that I need a reply to proceed are added here

- todo: any malls that need a reply are added here.

- inbox: I only keep emails in my inbox that are high priority/ intend to resolve within the day. I move emails from “follow up” or “todo” to “inbox” if I feel I should reply within the day for whatever reason

I try to reach “inbox zero” a few times a week.

It’s simple enough to reliably keep less than 50 emails (2 days worth) in my inbox. Depending on my workload and urgency, I can decide to reply to email immediately or move to “todo” or “follow-up”. If I have some downtime, I go through each folder and move as necessary.

Still working on slack-type messages. Respond immediately or Mark as unread works for the most part. Now that I’ve typed this out I think I’ll try “send me an email and I’ll reply when I can” for the remaining messages.