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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1731 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 31, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Can you share the email guide?

I didn't keep a copy, but tl;dr (and IMO and IME):

  • Organizing your emails is important. Whether at work or at home, you want to be able to find information without having to sift through the hundreds of results of a search across your entire email account. Keeping all your old emails in an undifferentiated "inbox" or "archive" folder full of literally thousands (or even tens of thousands) of messages is dumb.

  • For your personal email account, Gmail and Proton Mail let you organize emails in overlapping labels. It's convenient to organize by sender and by topic. For example: You can put all your receipt emails from an online retailer that fails to collect state sales tax in the "receipts", "[retailer name]", and "sales tax deferred" labels. Months later, when you're doing your annual state income tax return, it will be easy to export to PDF all the emails in the "sales tax deferred" label, and put those PDFs in the "tax documents" folder on your computer to help you calculate the sales tax that you owe.

  • For your work email account, Outlook lacks good label functionality, but it lets you organize emails in nested (non-overlapping) folders. It's convenient to organize by topic. (In most cases, the identity of the sender doesn't matter, since you will be working with lots of different people on any given project. But you may still want to put emails from, e. g., Human Resources in their own folder, and then use subfolders for HR topics.) In the rare event that an email is relevant to multiple topics, you can click-and-drag with the right mouse button in order to copy an email from one folder into a second folder.

This was already questionable advice in the age of search and is now probably worthless advice in the age of LLMs.

I've never organized my work emails beyond autotrashing some of them and I've been doing just fine for almost 20 years.

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