The Filing Cabinet is a Poor Metaphor for Email

Here's a Better Metaphor and How to Use It

I believe that email programs suffer from an over-identification with filing cabinets. In this essay, I talk about why, then discuss a better metaphor, and strategies for using that metaphor.

The Old Days -- No Search

The very first email programs didn't have a really good way to archive and retrieve messages when you had dealt with them. (This was probably a good thing because disk space was really expensive.)

After a while, users clamored for a way to organize their old messages. Programmers complied, and modeled their programs after the filing cabinets that they all knew well. Users could move messages into different folders in the same way that they would archive paper memos in their filing cabinets.

Eventually, programmers also added a "Search" feature. This meant that it was now very fast and easy to find misplaced old messages.

Note, however, that filing cabinets don't have 'Search' boxes. You can't walk up to a filing cabinet and ask it to give you all the memos from your boss from the past month. If you didn't file a paper memo well, it could take you hours or days. Thus with paper memos and filing cabinets, it was important to use a filing strategy that minimized the worst-case time it would take to find a memo: lots of folders with only a few memos in each folder.

With email, the Search/Find tools actually work quite well. It takes seconds or minutes to find old messages, not hours or days. Thus, it's more important to use a strategy that minimizes the time it takes to file something: a few folders with many messages in each folder.

I suspect users can usually get by with just two folders: the inbox for messages-in-progress and another folder for messages that users are done with.

Changing Folders with Filters -- Bad Idea

Okay, here's where it gets interesting.

At some point, users clamored for a way to organize messages before they were read, so related messages could be read all in one group. Since they already had folders in the filing cabinet model, and folders are places to group related things, it was natural that they should try to group messages in folders.

When programmers developed filters (or rules) to take specified actions when a message met certain conditions, they were mostly interested in moving messages into folders. Most filters are something along the lines of "move all messages from my boss into the Boss folder."

However, moving messages to different folders is dangerous. Many (most?) people can't keep track of their "to-do" messages when they are spread across many folders.

To continue with the analogy, using filters to move messages into folders before you read them is like hiring a filing clerk to sort your postal mail into folders before you read them.

Changing Categories with Filters -- Good Idea

Instead, you need to do something analogous to making piles of mail on your desktop: sorted, but still easily accessible and visible. You want the messages sorted in your inbox.

With some email programs, you can do this. What you need to do is use your filters to modify a field in your incoming messages that you can then sort your inbox by. For example:

With Microsoft Outlook, use the Rules Wizard to assign a message's Category, then set up a View that Groups messages by Categories. (For the nitty-gritty details on how to set up rules in Outlook, see my Outlook book.)
With Eudora, use your filters to change the Labels of incoming messages, then sort your mailbox first by Label, second by Date. (For the nitty-gritty details on how to set up filters in Eudora, see my Eudora book.)
With Netscape (4.72), you need to change your incoming messages' Priority. (Yes, this means that you won't see what the sender thought the Priority was. However, given how much people lie about their messages' Priority, this might not be a big drawback.)
With Mozilla, change the messages' Label, then sort your Inbox by Label.
With Outlook Express for Mac OS, change the Importance field. (See the Netscape entry immediately above.)
With Outlook Express for Windows, the filters can't change any field that you can sort by.
AOL's built-in email program doesn't have filters. (There are a few workarounds.)

Marking "Done"

Once you group messages in your inbox like this, it helps enormously if you move messages out of your inbox as soon as you don't need to do anything more with them. This means that the messages in your inbox are only the ones you need to deal with -- read, reply to, or act upon.

With Eudora, put a button in the toolbar to Transfer the message to a particular folder. (You can also set up Manual Filtering to move messages to a folder with the same name as the label, but that's a bit more complicated.)
With Outlook, it's not as easy; you need to install a macro in order to get a "move to done" button in the toolbar.
With other programs that I'm familiar with, you need to move the message out of the inbox by hand.

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
Updated 8 July 2002.