Small victories

[citoyen]

The folders and filtering are server-side,

Ah, clever!

[ian]

I don’t bother with anything fancy like folders. I treat email as ephemeral and forget about it. We use Google Mail on the mothership and it mostly sucks (you’d this might have a good search option, right?). That said it probably sucks just as much as any other email system. Oh to the good old days.

[perpetual dan]

I’ve never got on with automatic filtering of mail to folders on arrival. I don’t want to be hunting around to find unread messages. Only a fraction of my mail gets filed by sender, but subject and topic are only weakly correlated. I keep and file many messages, but there’s more that are only interesting the once - or never. They don’t need a place to keep them, other than the bin.

I also only read mail a couple of times a day for my work account, and a couple of times a week for the less exciting ones. So may not be typical more generally.

[ian]

We mostly communicate with Teams. Which is far worse.

[citoyen]

We use Google Mail on the mothership and it mostly sucks (you’d this might have a good search option, right?). That said it probably sucks just as much as any other email system. Oh to the good old days.

If you think Gmail searching is bad, be thankful you don't have to use Outlook.

This rare bout of taking an interest in how my inbox functions has led me to discover that Google have added a lot more features since I last looked under the hood. Gmail seems to be quite sophisticated now. But like everything, it probably takes a long time to set up exactly how you want it. And then some update will break your settings.

I'm quite happy on the whole for everything to just land in my inbox and I'll keep on ignoring the bits that don't interest me, with the occasional cull to get rid of the backlog of unread emails.

[Mr Larrington]

Us:	This $SOFTWARE_PRODUCT which you have forced upon us is complete and utter shite*!
The Mgt:	It's saving us MONEY!
Us:	It's still shite!

One such was going from Outlook to Chocolate Factory Mail.  Oh, how we laughed** as we tried to find the equivalent of having a stock message in your “Drafts” folder to be lightly modified and sent on a daily basis.

* or rather even MOAR shite than whatever we had been using before they dropped the change on us on a Monday morning, having announced it late on Friday afternoon.  EST.
** FSVO.  It mostly manifested itself in banging one’s head on the desk while simultaneously eye-rolling and frothing at the mouth

[barakta]

You can totally remove stuff from web Gmail's inbox. I do it on the work account where I have to use Google-everything, I just tag or archive stuff so the inbox stays clear.

I do also use thunderbollocks desktop client for home mail on a similar setup to Kim's (cos she sysadmins it).

I find a folder full of emails makes me REALLY stressed and anxious. I then can't find stuff that is clearly there which is stressful too. By clearing it, I can keep track of TODO stuff.

At other work, using Outlook I archive most stuff and use search cos we have a linked CRM for student-email stuff, but I do have folders for certain things for easy browsing/skimming. I have shortcuts setup for "mark as read" and "archive" so I can control it all from the keyboard and minimise mousing.

[ElyDave]

Me and senior compatriot both have the problem that everybody ask us everything. As a result I can have an hour phone call, come back and have a hundred new emails to ignore. I work on the same principle as phone messages, if its really important they'll  send it again, and I might catch it second time round.

[Mr Larrington]

The! Inbox! on! my! Yahoo! Mail! account! currently! contains! 1! (one)! message!  A notification about some gig tickets having been posted*.  I'll move it somewhere more appropriate when they arrive.

* Miss von Brandenburg always wants Proper Tickets and since this gig is her next year's birthday present…

[citoyen]

One of the things I like about my new job: I shut down my desktop computer at 17.26 and made it to the station in time for the 17.32. Yes, I had to run a bit but it doesn’t take all that much longer to walk.

We’re only doing two days a week in the office, but these small details make a big difference to how tolerable office days can be.

One of the other things I like is that the office is right next door to the Olympic pool, so I got in early this morning and went for a lovely 1.5km swim before work - and another small victory of the day was having the lane entirely to myself for most of the time I was in the water.