So one of GMail’s great strengths and/or weaknesses is that it’s not folder-based.
I’m a big folder guy. As soon as I fire up a new e-mail account, I’m breaking things into folders and rules/filters to shove mail into them. I have such a volume of e-mail, that it seems impractical to do anything else.
GMail doesn’t allow that. Everything comes into the inbox. Everything is saved into a single archive. Madness reigns.
Except, really, it doesn’t. What GMail brings to the table is the searching power of Google. As long as you’ve got standard text you can search on, you can pull up all the messages and conversations on a given subject with a simple search.
You can also create labels (tags) for messages, manually or again by filters. Thus you can look at all the messages/threads with a particular label as though they were in their own folder. One advantage GMail has is that you can also turn around and apply multiple labels to a given e-mail message, creating (essentially) a multi-dimensional folder array.
One other “advantage” to GMail — or possibly a disadvantage — is that things don’t conveniently disappear. With all those folders and rules pushing messages automagically into them, it’s been really easy for messages to be stealthily received. Now everything shows up in my inbox, and if I don’t want the inbox to get out of control, I’ll have to actually deal with them as they come in.
One problem there is that GMail doesn’t let you sort the display — though the clustering of conversatoin threads gets around a chunk of that.
It’s a different model, at least a bit. Not necessary a bad thing
And an unintended consequence — encouragement to actually unsub from a lot of mailing lists, catalogs, etc. Which is almost certainly a good thing.
Another change: Had to go back to using Siggy (yay!) as my signature manager. Yeah, I’m sure there are other sig file managers that do the same thing even better than this Win95/NT-era program. But I go with what works.