Organizing Sent Email

I’m having a really tough time finding a useful tool or system to easily organize sent email. Every “organizing your email” tutorial out there seems to focus on the deluge of inbound email and how to handle, process, and organize it.

An overlooked problem, it seems, is organizing your sent email. Typically, most of us, when we need to find an email we sent previously, just search through our email Sent folder. Thunderbird and Outlook are more than capable of doing this.

What if I just want to easily browse through the last 20 emails I sent someone?

What if I just want to find the very first email I sent someone?

Switched to Google Reader, despite earlier review

I reviewed Google reader sometime ago, after its major update, and wasn’t impressed. I had been looking for an online feed reader so I could make use of my time away from my home computer by catching up on the blogs that I read. At the time, I had been using the built-in feed reader of Thunderbird, my email program.

However, after continual frustration with being stuck somewhere, waiting on someone or something, and wishing I could use the twenty minutes to catch up on my blog reading, I finally decided to give Google Reader a more comprehensive try. I’ve been using it for the past two months as my only feed reader.

Spam is Beyond Control

One thing many folks don’t seem to fully grasp is that if you want to be available, that is to say, if you want people to contact you, then you must allow spam in your life. I hate these Russian-originated stock quote spam emails as much as you, but it is a necessary evil in order that people can conveniently have an email address.

Often, I’ll see blog postings and various tech magazines give a list of dozens of ways to control spam. It is quite often more time-consuming and frustrating to implement those ideas than it is to just let spam take its course.

The Switch to Firefox and Thunderbird

Well, after a long day’s work, I took an extra hour to make the switch to Firefox and Thunderbird. It is part of my long-term goal to ween myself off of Microsoft’s products. I’m pretty much an Excel expert so I don’t know how I’ll last in the long run. I’ve been using Firefox for a long while now, but I made it my default browser and imported all my settings and my favorites. Very easy.