I don't use folders, just labels. This is what I have. All just in the Archive. Most are generic a few are specific to me.
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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Thanks for sharing! I like your labels! Yesterday I realised that if you archive your emails they are removed from the folders they were originally organised into, and here I was making folders for literally everything. Time to reorganise and utilise labels more. :)
I have a folder for each additional email identity that I created and a filter to sort incoming emails into these folders and then a few labels like "Invoices", "Vet" or "Medical" that get applied automatically.
I leave everything that needs action in the Inbox. All other mail I move to Archive.
For the rest I use Search.
I really need to archive my emails more often to prevent my inbox from becoming a cluttered mess. Do you use labels?
No. The content of the e-mail is most of times enough to be found in search.
I've tried this before but it just leads to me wasting my time with organisation I never need. If I need to take action on it, it stays unread or gets starred; if I need it for reference it stays in the inbox; if I might need it one day in the future it goes to the archive, else it gets deleted. The search seems fine for finding specific emails.
I ran into a similar problem once I upgraded my subscription and brought in a few different email accounts I have. I have a Proton account, a personal domain, and a domain for a website I own (trying to minimize my use of 15+ email accounts).
My instinct was to run a filter to put each account into a folder. Coming from Apple's email system, this made sense to me. However, Proton has the Inbox as the launch folder so I would have to always go to All Mail to view all my mail then dive into each folder if I wanted to view accounts that way.
I've changed my filters to apply labels rather than divvy into folders. This allows me to view all incoming messages in Inbox while choosing labels if I want to be more specific. I use the colors in the labels to reference the root account (ex., purple for three ProtonMail addresses). This process took some time and required that I move things out of the filter folders and back to the Inbox.
I no longer have any folders. My problem with folders is that they remove messages from the Inbox and I'm likely to forget I moved something. I could see some use cases for them (collating travel plans) but for now I don't need them.
I have eight filters for email Recipient. The rest are to organize things like stuff for my car, for my apartment, purchases, newsletters, healthcare/insurance, etc.
I do have a lingering concern about future migration. It was relatively easy to move my domain accounts from other email providers to Proton but I'm not clear how that works if I decide to leave proton.
This is actually one of the things I found out after setting up a bunch of folders so I'm thinking about removing the folders altogether and stick to using labels, as others have suggested as well.
Initially it didn't make sense to me to not use folders but I didn't realise that once the emails are archived they're no longer stored in that folder anyway.
So if I understand it correctly the folders are only really useful for sorting incoming unread emails. And I indeed found myself checking every single folder for emails which was more work than if I had not used those folders in the first place.