Even something as simple as finding a certain message from a certain friend would not be so simple when such friend is always changing email addresses (and not supplying a Full Name). Now they are all in a single folder.

I also keep all messages related to a project in a particular folder. There would be no easy way to search for such messages, as they could have come from any number of addresses and will often not have any mention of the name of the project we’re working on.

Google Mail’s idea of labels (like tags) isn’t bad. You can attach more than one to a message, obviating the need to save it in more than one folder.

STEVE SAYS: Good points and thanks for the comment. My theory is that google has trained us to be able to find things with a few tries of keywords. So far, I have been able to do a quick combination, and get a list of 5 - 10 emails, in which I quickly see the one I want. But, my queue is one month old, not 6 months, not 2 years. And the emails are recent enough that I can generally recall something specific about them — my memory will fade and trying to get back a really old email may be hard. Also, this works for finding a specific email, it may not work as well for finding *all* emails relating to a topic.

Taking time to label (and define your label lexicon) would take just as much time as filing. Good idea, but not a huge time differential in effort to tag your email vs. file it. My opinion, of course.