A decade of email

[lethargic_man]

After ewx (only I'd been using email for four years, and six months into a substantial e-correspondence, before it occurred to me I might actually want to keep my emails and not just treat them like post-its next to the 'phone):

(The red line includes LJ comment notifications; the green line excludes them.)

Well, that was interesting. My correspondence with rysmiel between early '97 and when I finished my Ph.D. in mid 2000 is clearly demarcated. The start of my relationship with livredor is also clear, in 2002, but there's no sign of the tail-off in mid '04 I'd have expected; and I'm frankly surprised my general level of correspondence since then has been as high or higher. (The broad spike in late '05 was due to a brief correspondence with someone who had the annoying habit of addressing each point in an email in a separate response.)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

More interesting I find people's email organisational habits, something rarely spoken or written about.

Excluding people who just leave everything in their inbox and rely on filtering (which i totally admit can work perfectly well), does anyone have an efficient way of organising their email into folders?

Darren Grant

[(Anonymous)]

er, qed.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I make extensive use of folders at work, much less so at home. My email remains in my inbox whilst it needs replying to or otherwise attending to, then most of it gets filed in correspondence. When I burn a DVD backup of my filespace, I append correspondence to allmail and then split it back into folders by year, under the archive folder. The rest of my email largely goes into orders, chits, jokes, cool and delenda.

[(Anonymous)]

funny pun.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

What pun?

[(Anonymous)]

is delenda effectively a trash can?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Effectively, yes. Delenda is Latin for "those things which must be destroyed"; the word is familiar to modern culture in the phrase Carthago delenda est (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est).

[(Anonymous)]

.. 'del'

get it?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

It's not a pun; it's where the word "delete" comes from. (The past participle—"those things which have been destroyed"—is deleta.)

[(Anonymous)]

ok, it's not a funny pun!

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

:o) (Should have kept my trap shut.)