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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the name "inbox" is what causes people so much stress. I don't think of it as an actual inbox. It's just where my mail goes - all of it. I read everything, but I don't bother organizing it. Occasionally I'll mark some message as important, or keep a few open so I can get to them later. But most often, I don't.

Search is easy. I don't see the point in organizing my mail.

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True for Gmail (and similar, I'm sure), not so true for my corporate Outlook account where search sucks and is really slow, and has ridiculously tiny storage allocated so I actually have to archive older messages in an actual file...

What about something like OfflineIMAP + notmuch or mu? That works for me, and search is as good (or better) than it was for me using Gmail.

Not all Exchange setups are configured to allow IMAP access...

Sounds like you just have an incompetent IT department. Storage is cheap and fast searching of databases is a solved problem.

As of a week ago, I was on Notes at work, which had not-so-great search. I still did this. Once or twice in the past few years I had to go in an delete large attachments, but I do that when it becomes a problem. It's not worth the mental effort of categorizing emails. (And deleting counts as categorizing.)

Now I'm on Verse (http://www.ibm.com/social-business/us/en/newway/), and it has great search. I'll keep doing what I was doing, just with even less pain.

I'd say gmail labels are more like premade searches (with the added bonus of the unread count). I tend to move every email I expect into it's own label with filters and the "inbox" is just for the unexpected stuff.

organizing email is a fool's errand.

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