The world would instantly halt if we stopped sending emails. Everything from meet ups to US senate investigations rely on Email, it's strengths and it's weaknesses. I have been battling with Email for quite some time now.

It starts with my now four email accounts that (one day) I'll have to consolidate, to the tons of mostly spam mail I receive from various companies and that I don't really want to think about these kind of messages. I have tried to read the standards (The famous RFCs that is) and not gotten very far. So now I am trying to consolidate my various efforts in this article and see where that gets me. I'll hope this journey along the road to efficient internet communication will be as interesting for you as it is for me.

This article relies on some of the concepts that I have described in this article so it is recommended that you read that one at one point. As a result of the philosophy I have described there I'll try to use command line compatible tools but when taking a look in that direction then it becomes clear how complicated these tools are (which can be traced to the complexity of the standard itsself.

As soon as there where multi user operating systems (like the failed but terribly influential MULTICS) it soon became possible to leave messages for other users of the computer system. These would be displayed at login. Then with the development of the ARPANET the messages where adapted to make it possible for messages to be passed between computers on the same network. This proved terribly useful resulting in 75% of traffic being electronic mail. These networks where however mostly internal to a company. With the advent of the Internet (literally intert-network network) it quickly was demed useful to be able to send messages between different organisations e.g. for the purpose of doing business together.

When in the 1980's the internet opened up to the public (as in individuals) through the means of ISPs these individuals quickly wanted to have access to an email account. In the early days again Email was the dominant reason for network traffic. With the advent of forums, Wikis and other sites that traffic lost in relevance and is now mostly dwarfed by the large amounts of Traffic generated by the plethora of video streaming services.

##deciding on a strategy The way to deal with Emails is a bit of a religious questions because it is highly individual. Some use the Inbox as a kind of todo list and get anxious when it has to many items in it and others I know have in excess of 10000 Mails in their inbox and use the "Read" tag to decide if Emails need attention or not.

The other major thing that I (and I think most other people) do is somehow archive and organize Emails. There are again many different possibilities on how to do that and finding a way to do that that fits you is important. In the past I have had a divide and conquer kind of strategy that sorted the incoming mail into many different folders and then I looked into the folders for unread mail. I then read that mail (or at least skimmed over it) and as soon as it was marked unread I considered it done. The folders simply fill up so I don't really have an age based archiving strategy.

The thing I forget about computers is that they are very (and I mean very) good at searching and sorting things so going through thousands of emails in search for one is not as big a problem as it would be without a computer. Therefore it is feasable to simply use a large folder that is organized by year and then to search through that folder with the help of the computer.

As I do think more topical than chronological some of that goes against my nature. But I don't use the computer much to search for emails because thunderbird normally does a relatively bad job (at least for me) in looking through emails. With mutt however this seems to be less of a problem and so I think I am going to opt for a more computer aided approach to Email by using the search functionality of my MUA (Mail User Agent).