Ah, the endless streams of emails we receive and the countless ones that we never dare to part with. Some really are important, such as the instructions for the lava lamp you bought on eBay and the funny cartoon of the guy on the bicycle. But all of them need a permanent home if you intend to keep them and ever have hope of finding them again. Organizing email is not a one-size-fits-all thing. To properly organize your email, you need a system that works for the way you tend to store and retrieve information.
Organizing email begins by recognizing how much trouble you are willing to go through to find the information at a later date. Be honest. If you are willing to spend more time filing the emails and less time retrieving them, a more complicated filing system will work for you. If you just want to get it out of the way for now and worry about retrieving it just in case you ever need it, a more simplistic filing system is the way to go.
Original Lava Lamps
The first step in organizing emails is to create a filing system. If you are in the first group (file it meticulously and retrieve it easily later), create detailed file folder names and use your hierarchy system to create sub-folders within each email folder. For example, if you are working on three projects with Beth from accounting, make folders under Beth (or the account name) and have three separate folders, one for each project. If you are among the second group (get rid of it, I may or may not need it later), make a folder for Beth (or the name of the account) and stick all of your communications with Beth in that folder.
There are a number of software packages that can assist you in organizing email. When organizing your emails, do not forget to organize the emails in your Sent folder as well as those from your Inbox. This is helpful later when someone has replied to you without including the text from your original email. The answer to a question is not usually relevant when nobody can remember what the question was.
Determine when you are going to tackle organizing email. You can do this as you read and respond to messages, once a day, once a week or whatever works for you. The important thing is to do it on a regular basis so that the emails do not pile up on you. When your Inbox overwhelms you, you might be tempted to start deleting emails that you need later on. There is no telling what could happen if you forever lose the instructions for that lava lamp.