Organising "Sent Items" In Emails

[Dating Specialist]

Hello everyone

Firstly to start with I'm not really a very organised person. So I've done my best to organise my emails so that they won't choke up all my inbox. I've set up rules and all that stuff.

But now I have this problem of sorting the "Sent Items". As at now, I don't file them in any folders. So you can imagine the long list of emails I've sent out that are lying in the Sent Items folder.

Does anyone have a good idea to organise them so that we can locate them easier thereby saving time and becoming more productive?

I was toying whether to mirror all the inbox folders and use them as sent items for the respective subjects?

Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks guys!

[RT Wolf]

Use Gmail and have everything sorted into conversations. I forward all my other accounts to gmail and send out emails from gmail from those accounts. There's also a short whitepaper on using Getting Things Done with Gmail that might help you.

[Keith]

Is there any reason you can't sort your sent mails into the same categories you sort your receieved mails into?

[Lynn 007]

In my home e-mail I go through my inbox and delete on a regular basis. Anything I need to sort in my inbox or sent box goes into three categories:
Family, Friends, Misc.

In my work e-mail where I receive about 130 e-mails daily and send about 70 daily, I seperate them by month. I try to make a point of only keeping one e-mail with the thread of replies and not all of the e-mails that have gone back and forth. At the end of each year I archive all of them into one folder with the year.

If I need to find anything I usually know within a month or two when I replied. I also have sub-folders where I would put projects or standard presentations I would use on a regular basis.

Hope that's helpful.

[Matthew Shea]

I just leave the sent items folder alone with the sole exception of setting up an autoarchive rule in Outlook to clear out anything over 60 days old (company policy, but I'd probably do something similar on my own). For me, finding an old sent message is usually a simple matter of remembering who I sent it to, usually a trivial matter, or, failing that, remembering a few key words from the subject or body. Either of these are very easy to search for, especially the former. I wouldn't worry about it and I don't feel sent or deleted e-mails are indicative of your organizational ability, although I consider myself a very organized person. Personally, I focus on my inbox, keeping items only as long as a topic is still active, after which they get deleted, or, in the rare case I need a record of the conversation, such as with a purchase, archived to a folder.

[and]

I'm with RT Wolf.... Use Gmail, they even have Gmail for domains, so you can set up your domain to use Gmail. You can set up filters and tags to sort your emails automatically. This is a huge time saver.

[Dating Specialist]

Thanks guys.

Well the reason why I'm not using Gmail (I do have one though but not for work) is it's web-based. So in the event that I don't have internet connection I can't check the emails that I've received previously.

So sticking with Microsoft Outlook.

Reason why I'd like some advice on sent items is because sometimes there is a need to keep a copy so that I can know I've already replied this person and is waiting for his/her response. I would know what have I communicated.

But after looking at your advice, I went to toy around with some of the rule settings for sent items and realised I can set a folder and automatically file the mails sent from a specific email account to that folder (as I have a few emails under one outlook window).

Thanks all of you. I really appreciate it

[boris]

Outlook 2007 indexes your emails and allows very quick search, just as GMail does.

Being 'very organized' is not necessary a virtue. If you can quickly find any email you don't need to organize them in folders.