If you are a regular reader of my blog you will remember my Digital Filing Cabinet Series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Well, since writing the series I have been tweaking my workflow here and there to make things smoother, especially when it comes to repetitive tasks. Now one area that I hadn’t really focused on to much was email. I generally have a good approach to email thanks to Merlin Mann and his Inbox Zero methodology, but I started to look into some of the emails I get on a regular basis and analyse how I process them, and if I could do anything better.

I found out that the email I get can be put into 5 main categories. My approach to processing them is inline with Merlin’s, but I wanted to look at how I could improve my own personal workflow using some of the tools I use already, and I thought I would share it with you in the hope that it helps somebody at some level as it is likely, if you are a Mac user, you have the same toolset.

1) Junk - This is in essence spam and while I have several layers of protection you can’t avoid getting the odd one through. In my case these are normally emails from friends and family that require me to prove my love in some way by forwarding on some “Give me a Hug” email to everyone I know. Now usually I just delete these, but thinking about it that doesn’t really resolve the problem. So using Text Expander from Smile on my Mac I have crafted a number of canned responses that politely request that the sender doesn’t send me any more of this type of mail. I have certain “Insert Name Here” type fields to personalise the reply, which I find usually works a lot better with people.

2) Informational – This type of mail is usually from Mailing Lists I have subscribed to or from organisations that I am interested in and contains information on their latest projects or services. Now I would normally look at these and leave them in my inbox until I had time to read them properly. This is distracting as it really takes the focus away from the more important email that I need to process. So using Mail.App Rules I have simply set up a number of rules to move these to other folders. This way I can read them when I have time. I also class all email I am CC’d on as “Informational” and move, via a Mail.App rule to a dedicated folder and mark it as read.

3) Reports / Files – This type of mail is usually an automated report I have requested such a Google Analytics or a database backup of my website which I have scheduled and receive via email. In both cases I treat these in the same way as I do “Informational” email using rules using a Mail.App rule to move the message to another folder which in this case is the trash but not before running an AppleScript that saves the attachment to my Downloads folder. Why do this? Well, email is simply a delivery mechanism here. I do not want to keep these files in my email as they would take up far to much space, and in my view email is not a suitable storage medium. Now at present, like “Informational” email I tend to check these when I have time, but I do intend to find a way to automatically create a “To-Do” item to ensure I review these in a timely manner. After all I have requested the data for a purpose and there is little point in doing so unless there is an action tied to the request.

For those that are interested the AppleScript I use to save email attachments is below. This script doesn’t do anything amazing and contains no real logic, it does exactly what it says on the tin.

** Note the part in red is the full path to MY Downloads folder. You will need to change this to the folder you want the files to end up in, if you can’t find the full path in Finder select the “Show Path Bar” option from the Finders View menu **

using terms from application "Mail"
	on perform mail action with messages theMsges
		set theAttachmentPath to "Macintosh HD:Users:Mark:Downloads:"
		tell application "Mail"
			repeat with ThisMessage in theMsges
				set Attached to mail attachments of ThisMessage
				repeat with ThisAttach in Attached
					set FileName to name of ThisAttach
					save ThisAttach in theAttachmentPath & (FileName)
				end repeat
			end repeat
		end tell
	end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from

using terms from application "Mail"
	on run
		tell application "Mail" to set sel to selection
		tell me to perform mail action with messages (sel)
	end run

Once the attachment has been saved to my Downloads folder I use Hazel from Noodlesoft, which allows me to define file level system rules that can manipulate files and folders, for example I have a rule that monitors the Downloads folder and watches for my weekly Google Analytics report, renames it something friendly and moves it to an appropriate location in my DropBox. I do the same thing with my weekly web site database backup files. The Google Analytics report is an example where I need to create a corresponding To-Do item as I request it to identify potential issues with the site.

4) Delegate – These are emails that I need to send on to other people, but don’t need to do anything with personally. These I tend to forward, create a to-do to follow up on later, and then file. Now this is where I use another application called Mail Act-On from indev Software. I tried out Mail Act-On in my Digital Filing Cabinet Series and at the time thought it was more than I needed. However since then I have tried it several times and each time found it more and more useful, as it allows me to move / copy / etc an email with the press of a few buttons. This is useful as I don’t need to take my hands off the keyboard when processing email to drag and drop the item into what could be a deep folder structure.

5) Actionable – These are emails I need to something with. I try to respond to these as quickly and succinctly as possible and then file them, once again using Mail Act-On. What I have determined however is that I need to get away from my hierarchical folder system of storing messages. This is probably where I can see Mail Tags coming in, but for me that is a big change in thinking and one I am likely to struggle with, although it may help with the follow up side of email processing that can often be overlooked.

What does all this mean, well it means that right now I have no email in my inbox. I still have a number of area’s that I need to address, such as ‘How long should you keep email?” and how I might use DevonThink to do this in a way that works for me.

I use a very similar approach at work, although there I am using Windows 7 and Outlook 2007. I have slightly different classifications but they amount to the same thing. Now if I could use the Mac…..