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How Do You Organize Your Data?
kpellegr asks: "After returning from a well deserved holiday, I was faced with an exploding inbox. While organizing and deleting my mail, I realised I was having trouble classifying each mail into one specific folder. I had the feeling I should be able to link to one email from several folders (e.g. product information should be linked to from the 'vendor' folder, as well as from a specific project folder where this product is used). The more I thought about this, the more I realised that trees (such as the Windows filesystems) are not really ideally suited for organizing data. On UNIX-like filesystems, symbolic links allow the creation of simple graphs for organising data, but I have the feeling data could be organized more efficiently. How does the Slashdot crowd organize their data? How do you manage files, email, contacts, meetings and all the relationships that might exist between them?"
That way, I never need to worry about what folder to put it in.
I don't...-lol
And I check it twice.
Checking twice really helps.
How do you manage files, email, contacts, meetings and all the relationships that might exist between them?
Easy! Do what I do and don't have any friends, contacts, meetings, or relationships with people!
I started with a Mac back in the day, so I just throw everything on the desktop and clear it out once a month or so...
...what is this "organize" ?
This is exactly the concept behind virtual folders. The idea is that folders, whether they be in the context of an email program or a filesystem, are actively updated searches. For example, all of your emails could be in one pool, invisible to you. Then each folder would be associated with a rule similar to email filter rules we use now. If an email matches, it shows up, maybe in multiple folders. Bayesian rules allow for even better classifications, if an email is similar enough to several catagories, it can show up in all of them.
Spencer Ogden
When I can't see alll the icons then I shift it...
'nuff said
-This is not a sig, it's an optical illusion
I think that Evolution's Virtual Folders will let you do what you describe, for email.
Although I've never used it, I seem to recall that Evolution's virtual folders were created specifically to allow this sort of thing.
I organize files according to breast size, number of women, and relative perversity of the acts commited.
Duh!
You can't take the sky from me...
...it's a windows only product, but for organizing email on windows boxes, I would recommend Nelson. I use it at work, and it allows me to organize a single email using multiple classifications and has a ton of other feartures. Check it out.
A dash of arbitrary directory trees and a pinch of grep.
But seriously, this subject is kind of lacking. The problem I have with organized storage is keeping it organized. I don't have the time nor the will. I need some sort of automagic organization.
I'm still using a flat file system, you insensitive clod!
If you want to manage everything (or almost everything) in a pretty organized way, get a fully integraded enviroment, such as KDE or GNOME. Set up some filters for your e-mail so it gets automaticly to the wanted folder. Get your files in separated folders, too. Than set up a backup system so you don't lose everything. This system works pretty well for me and for most people that I know. If set it up properly, you can even get it to work with your PDA!
It's called search.
No, seriously? There are no secrets anyway. Just put it on the web and Google for it.
Drat. 3rd time's the charm... I have no personal files, you insensitive clod!.
One more try. HOT GRITS!
Crap. There's not a shred of sincerity left in me tonight. Good luck organizing your data, though.
--Jasin Natael
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
i usually roll up a big cone, and wait for random acts of organization to happen...
1. Junk
2. Not Junk
Whay more do you need?
There is a application called "Spring" which has been out for a while now. The company that released it a revolutionary new way to organize and completely tasks.
l
Links to check out:
-Their site(scroll down to "PATHS" for what probably will interest you) http://usercreations.com/spring/SpringContent.htm
tilTrue.info contechtext.info prettypowerful.info twitter.com/frets fb.com/prosody
Better yet: how do you mantain this well organized data in your palmtop, desktop email addressbook, PIM applications, and mobile phone syncronized? Sure, you can query it with your LDAP aware email client and access in a reserved web page when you forgot your mobile devices.
What I do is I realize "This is all a mess" as I see thousands of files in my home directory. So I created a bunch of subdirectories for various things. (Some were logical, some were just by file type -- /png, /txt, etc.) Then, I found that making such an organized structure was too complicated, and stopped before I acually moved anything into any of the subdirectories.
On Windows, it's slightly different. I save everything to my desktop, then when it gets 'full,' I delete just about everything, realizing I no longer need it.
Not that I RECOMMEND these strategies, but it works.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
porn1
porn2
New Folder
New Folder(1)
unsorted_porn
mp3s
The good news is, that while the Window's file system may not support this, if you wait until 2005 (2006, 2007?), this highly demanded feature will be in the next release of Windows -- yes, everyone's favourite Longhorn will turn everything into a database.
Frankly, I don't think turning an OS into a DBMS is the right thing to do, but for certain applications, having this functionality omnipresent will be useful. Well, OK, for this one application, I'm still waiting to see examples of others.
/home/josh/PICS, /home/josh/MUSIC, /home/josh/DOCUMENTS, /home/josh/VIDEO,
I love wikis (see also Twiki, a very flexible one, and Openwiki if you prefer M$ technologies): you can organize anything you want, with anyone you want. It's more suited to a workgroup of people, but they work for individuals too. They're totally flexible, extensible, and templatable.
I'm sure people here will come up with ideas like knowledge trees and weird topological concepts, but gimme a wiki any day.
NT
A friend of mine used to use what he termed an archaeological filing system.
It was based on the simple principal that the older something was the further down in the pile it would be.
Your all-in-one-folder technique and "ls -t" would work equally well.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Hmm...this isn't how I do it, but what about something like this:
Disclaimer: This works in theory; practically it would require a hell of a lot of resources.
The basic idea would be a relational database. You've got say the files in one table, and categories in another. The categories can have a parent, so you get something of a tree view going. Then, when you select something from a tree view, it comes up with all items from that category.
Creating this would be easy; optimizing it wouldn't be.
I have found that you can file a LOT of stuff under Miscellaneous. Also, If you start creating sub-folders under deleted items to categorize your trash, you need professional help.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
I have been mulling the same thing for a while. I have considered dumping all the mail into a database and having each email "point to a folders." The would allow a single email to be described by several different parameters.
I have often wanted to be able to place an email into a folder without copying the entire email thread. However, doing this removes the email from the context of the thread. In my mail client (MozMail), there is no way to have an email in one folder point back to a thread in a different folder. At least no way that I know of.
I believe that some email clients do use a database back end for mail. However, re-indexing is supposed to take a long time. I am not sure of the best solution to the re-indexing problem, but I suspect that a few simple tables containing subject lines and message ID's should not be too difficult. If a small table such as this pointed back into a filesystem where the full text of the email resided, one might be able to separate the problem into managable chunks.
Maybe it is time for a quick perl/mysql proof of concept...
Someone has to bring it up, so it might as well be me! Opera7 mail folders are really filters onto the mail database, meaning you can have the same message in multiple folders. Just in case you didnt know :)
That is what quite a few people using windows use. Eventhough it does not have some features, people prefer it because its more standardised.
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
I have my home directory (on a redhat box). the root level of my homedir is my crap directory. dangerously, the organized data lives in there in directories. for example, i have an Organized directory. in there, i have sub directories of different types. i wont go into how that is because i'll change my mind about it once i write it up, and i dont feel like redoing it right now. so, everything just ends up in my home directory until i sort it.
/, and then have a /system/libs/stuff, /system/configs, and all that good stuff. either that or just not see it period. speaking of period, i guess it'd be ~/.system instead of ~/system. I hate organizing my stuff, too. It's arguable how much easier it is to find once I organize it, if my mind one day decides that it should be "schoolwork" and another day "development", et cetera. i guess organizing your piles of junk is like your fingerprint... everyone's is different.
i wish my view of the system was more abstracted. i'd rather have my homedir as
another thing i wish, though, is that the filesystem were more... i dont know what to call it. but i wish i could store more meta data about my files. i wish my filesystem had a comments field, and i wish that doing a directory listing would spit out file attributes like dimensions, content length, number of words, and whatever other stuff i could glean by hand. i just want it to all show up. hell, i wish i could do a recursive directory listing based on file type, not file name. and not based on the extension... cause who says i use extensions? (of course i do, what are you, daft?!) unless its a text file. unix spoiled me and i dont put extensions on those.
heck. i wish there was a way to just export my entire home directory with everything i said into one giant 22 gigabyte compressed file that i can save somewhere, drop into a new computer, and just be up and running again just like that.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
... and grep
;-)
Seriously, I try to keep different partitions set for specific things, this helps in case something gets borked on one drive, it won't mess up other partitions, of course there are backups made to ensure not much is lost.
Try doing something like this (if on *nix)
- /dev/hda3
/home/$USERNAME/pers (personal stuff like diaries or so)
- /dev/hda4
/home/$USERNAME/codes (if you're a programmer)
- /dev/hda5
/home/$USERNAME/music (take a guess)
Get the picture? The good thing about this setup is, one could always umount in case someone gets physical access to the machine, heck it could be scripted to mount and unmount on login and logout. Or you could encrypt the partitions for added security.At first it looks bulky, but in the end it's very easy to maintain since everything tends to fall in place. e.g. If you're scripting you could just cd /home/$USERNAME/code and not have to wonder where to save this. Unless you're really odd (like me) and begin everything with test.c or test.py or something.
MoFscker
All mail are kept into one place (say, a MySQL database). You, however, setup filters (that is, SQL queries) that show your e-mails in virtual folders.
That is, messages can be in as many folders as they meet the selection criterion of.
In addition to the obvious "from", "date", "subject", you could assign an arbitrary number of categories which could constitute more selection criteria.
David Gelertner, the comp sci professor author and unabomber victim, has created software he calls Scopeware. It basically organizes information in a series of related chains. These can be date based or otherwise. I haven't used it, but I've read that he is responding to some of the same concerns you mention.
On a less lofty, but free, note, Evolution has "virtual folders" in which you can place anything a filter expression can select. I use them to sort my email by sender address. I still have my main inbox, and all the categorized subfolders, but the virtual folders select particular people out of the massive mail database. So I can recall that Joe said something three weeks ago that relates to a current problem, and look in the "Joe" virtual folder to find it. There's still no easy way to add arbitrary messages to a virtual folder, other than adding a filter rule that selects just that one message. At least I haven't found a way. But it seems to address part of your concern, for email at least.
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
One folder for offers from Nigerians to make me rich, one folder for penis enlargement, and one folder for pr0n offers... that handles about 99% of my incoming email. Isn't that what everybody else does?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I just export it to my web server, wait a couple of weeks for google to index it, and then google it.
Inbox.
Deleted.
Sent.
the "find" function is a godsend.
I store email in chronological order, grouped by month.
4 years worth of email, haven't had a problem finding anything yet -- just use 'Search'.
Nowadays I use spamassassin and some procmail rules I cobbled up that assign spam scores over 10 to /dev/null, and scores from 5-10 to a folder called (wait for it) "spam".
Besides that, I don't get any other mail.
I have a organizational system which uses two folders and replication.
Folder 1: INBOX
Folder 2: SENT EMAIL
Any email which is important I send to one or more anal-retentive people who will create nice organized folders in which to store the email. This how I implement replicated storage with automatic retrieval. If I ever need an email back I can simply ask for it and get a copy forwarded to me. Using this method I don't have to waste valuable brain power deciding what folder things go in. As a backup, if for some reason my replicated storage goes on vacation or is out of the office, I can search my sent folder and usually find what I need in there.
This method works extremely well plus it has the advantage of replicated storage which helps thwart hardware failures.
Good luck! Staying organized is a full time job!
According to this poll and this poll, a lot of them don't.
I personally separate my mailing list mail into one folder per list and spam into a spam folder. Everything else just sits in my "inbox" making it easier to find.
I use procmail to filter all my mail on arrival, it means I can prioritise what I want to read.
Or is that KAOS (as in "Get Smart") ?
I'm currently playing around with putting all my mail messages, bookmarks, web pages loaded, file accesses (on a day to day basis) into a database. Maybe not all the actual data, but the stuff that might help me find it when I need it. I'm hoping to eventually scan everything that changes on my computer or that I do for keywords and so on and then organize them so I can browse them by some kind of visual graph/map metaphor on any of several axes (type of file, date/time, keywords, directory ....).
I want to be able to go in with a query like "sometime in july I did something having to do with a picnic and watermelon" and get a list of possibilities, then be able to rate those in the hopes of finding the exact info I'm looking for.
OK, so far I only have some pieces of it. But I'm getting closer to a database schema for the information and that will help me figure out better what info I need to collect.
I use a tame black hole as a filing system.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
As many people will probably point here, you should check out Evolution's "virtual folders".
JWZ once proposed a more sophisticated approach to store mail without the hierarchical folder structure limits. You can read about it here: Intertwingle
I don't what came out of that. I think it is a good idea still waiting to be implemented.
I have all the email I've ever received stored chronologically in flat files. I use full-text search and navigation tools to locate what I need.
I use much the same technique for organizing the papers in my office.
In general you can spend effort imposing some organizational schema on your data, hoping that your organization will enable you to find information later. Or you can leave the data as it lies, and spend the effort at retrieval time, once you know what you're looking for.
Current tools, particularly those in Windows, aren't particulary amenable for this purpose, but they're getting better. For example, you can download a seearch engine and index your hard drive much like the web.
Even primitive tools like grep work pretty well for a few hundred megabytes of mail.
I was starting a personal database.
Arbitrary lists of key words, and a description.
But generally I organize by the type of document, then the topics.
Images/topic
Code/program task
documentation/area
It's been sent to the master in pile!
I know other people have mentioned Evolution's vFolders, but here a little more.
My goal is to never have an email that has value to me land in my inbox. Every time I get an email of "value" which stays in Evolution's inbox, I right click, and "Create Filter from Message". (I'm paraphrasing.)
Every good message should have at least one filter putting it into at least one folder. Some emails have more than one rule, but the whole right click -> create filter thing makes this quick and easy.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Project Name / {email|docs|notes|data|code} / Revision/files. Files are in yyyy_mm_dd_filename format with leading zeros filled. Then again.. I'm a DBA and nobody emails me, nobody calls me, blah. It works for data. There's no nice neat way to do it. I recently attended a franklin covey class and it really re-iterated a few things. Use one system, cross-reference, and keep it up to date. That's all I got out of the class because I think putting data on paper kills the data and it seems to be a real inefficient way to do things from a database standpoint.
So now, I run by the seat of my pants, 90 miles an hour with my ass on fire. I have one system that works. Put out the fires that'll get my ass burned. -B
Once you have procmail set up, it would be trivial to extract names and addresses into a MySQL database and use it from there.
Some argue procmail syntax is difficult to understand, but so do all beautiful, powerful languages appear to the benighted. :)
Since Windows NT 4 at least, I have been able to make hard links. Granted, the OS didn't come with a tool to do it, but it did support it. Several third party tools are available.
Also, I know in Windows 2000 and Windows XP (and I heard also Windows ME), Folder Shortcuts (these are NOT shortcuts to folders) are also supported. These graft folders into the namespace that actually exist elsewhere. I've tested this across physical drives, and I believe it would also work with network-mapped drives. Note that on Windows XP, you have to temporarily switch to the classic start menu to create a Folder Shortcut.
...organizing data was quite simple for Mac users. (All you Mac people out there have to admit: You're right with me on this. Don't lie!)
The process was simple:
- Save everything to the Desktop.
- When you couldn't see the background pattern anymore, create a new folder called "Desktop crap" or something, and move all the files into it.
- Move the folder on to the hard drive.
- Repeat.
:-DCAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Powermarks (www.kaylon.com) is a well-regarded bookmarking utility that uses a keyword index rather than a tree. It will automatically pull keywords from a page's title, and one can type others in quite easily. They need not be in any particular order.
Searching is quite rapid, and one can quickly winnow several thousand bookmarks down to what one wants.
Since it's based on keywords, things can be as cross indexed as you like. No "where do I put this", eanie meanie meinie mo. Want it there? Type the keyword. There too? Type that keyword.
I would find something similar wrapped into an email utility very useful.
Unfortunately, Powermarks hasn't yet made it out of Windows space. So, those interested in having a look (shareware) will have to play with the beast.
Anti SCO T-Shirts. Donates to the Open Source Now Fund with each purchase.
I keep all incoming emails (except spam) in a database. I probably get about 150 - 200 emails a day and it takes about half an hour to go through them every day.
I use Filemaker which indexes every word so I can search for any previous email by keywords. I also have scripts written that parse out the to, from, and subject fields into separate fields.
Have another field where I put comments and action items.
Have been using this system for several years and have over 150,000 emails in the database.
Also have other databases set up for keeping track of web sites I visit, newspaper articles, telephone calls, and configuration, problems, and solutions of my pcs.
I know it sounds like it takes a lot of discipline, but once you get used to using a system like this, it becomes automatic to use it, and it is great because I can go back and find emails going back years ago.
That said, this is probably overkill for your stated purpose of categorizing email messages. A good email search engine would probably serve you better.
I know it's pathetic, the file create date or something else should tell me the date, but I find naming folders and files with the first 8 digits being YYYYMMDD helps me alot. They always sort in date order. It's not a solution only a step I think helps.
Krispy Cream is people
Procmail. Procmail for everything.
I use microsoft exchange, and it randomly deletes, my data and users so i don't have to worry about organizing it :)
Sorry, i'm frustrated... I'm setting up an exchange server right now.
There are a few important factors. 1-Make smart folders. Maybe you're missing some more obvious relations between people. 2-What about simple shortcuts? Where applicable, create the one file/profile/link/etc you'll use and make shortcuts where you can. 3-GET RID OF STUFF YOU DON'T NEED. The most exhausting but succesful way to organize everything: get rid of whatever's in the way. 4-Find a better method. If you keep too many addresses, get a Rolodex or PDA. If you have too many folders, consider external storage (this drive/partition for work only). If you have too much pr0n or mp3s... consider an alternate lifestyle.
---Vote None of the Above---
Windows notepad and files on my desk: "Todo home" and "todo work". Oh, and "Todo download from winmx/kazaa" :-)
#!/bin/bash
/porn/
/dev/null
if $1 == porn then
mv $1
else
mv $1
fi
i think that's all the file management anyone really needs
The more I thought about this, the more I realised that trees (such as the Windows filesystems) are not really ideally suited for organizing data. On UNIX-like filesystems, symbolic links allow the creation of simple graphs for organising data,
Isn't a Windows shortcut essentially just a symbolic link (though perhaps a bit less transparent?).
There are a lot of people who do the same thing with Windows, too...
I have My Documents renamed to Stephan's Crap Dump, and store my videos and Miscellany in there. MP3's and FLAC rips have their own folder. And then I have a Downloads folder with patches/demos/warez. (-:Stephonovich:-)
"Who needs reincarnation when we've got parallel universes?" -Me
most of my mail goes in chronological order, and every few months, i'll migrate old mail into sub-folders('02, '99, etc) i've kept an archive of email going back 4 years and it's saved my ass a few times. i'll tag/label my mail so i don't miss internal email, usually in red(eudora or entourage)
regarding vendor based mail, i usually only keep mail from a vendor if it's relating to a specific tech support issue, which ends up turning into a mini knowledge base for myself.
maillists go in their appropriate folders so i don't inadvertantly toss them out, but these email don't get archived.
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
I understand the Reiser file-system is ultimately supposed to be like this.
And I heard that MS will incorporate this in Longhorn. I imagine Linux will play catch-up to this.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I just have the horrible nested folders which get rearanged in to categories way too often. Makes it hard to find stuff. Grep doesn't work too well on OpenOffice documents, etc.
There's Neo, Agendus for Windows users, and a couple of other products out there, but this is definately a place where a 'killer app' could be used. The only problem is that too many companies use Exchange vs. IMAP or some standard that people can't get off of Outlook (and Outlook sucks). Evolution has their Outlook connector so you can use it, but it's too similiar to Outlook (but at least it can get you off of Windows).
I know there is a better way, but I don't know what it is....
It also sounds similar to how Opera handles mail with the M2 e-mail client. It defines "access points" that can (but don't have to) look like folders for jumping into messages that meet a certain criteria. For example, all messages with an attached image are grouped together, as are all messages from a specific person, and all messages meeting some sort of user-defined criteria might also be lumped together under an "access point." In the end though, there really is only one mail box, these tools just allow you to "slice and dice" through your mail.
Keeping email organized is a lot harder than it should be. There is no good way to deal with things like a seminar announcement that I need to keep for two weeks but is junk after that, or stuff that I need to remember to read or reply to but don't want to read right now (or stuff I keep because I should read it but don't want to actually read ever).
It is also hard to remember that, when someone emails me some document, the place to store it is not in an email folder, but a directory dedicated to that project or subject. Like if someone sends a reference for a paper I am writing, it should go in ~/papers/journalname/papername/references or something, not just stay as an attachment in my inbox.
And once in a while, you have to waste a day or two reorganizing your crap and deleting old email. This is especially hard when I have copies of documents or programs on different computers, because I have to figure out which ones are the most recent and are the authoritative copy. CVS and rsync help here; CVS makes it obvious which copy is the best one (the one in CVS), and rsync makes it easy to keep things identical on different machines so you don't have the problem to begin with.
What was the question? Oh yeah. Let google index your entire file tree and use it to find stuff.
Check out www.thebrain.com - they've got a product called Virtual Brain that looks pretty interesting. You create a bunch of "thoughts" with names like "Business", "Family", "Sports", "Porn", then you can create "sub-thoughts" under these to categorize things further.
You might put links to photos, or Web pages containing photos under "Family". You can then crosslink these links to "Sports" for pictures of the kids at their school sports, and so on and so on. You can link in Excel spreadsheets etc. as appropriate; I've got my company's Excel phone list linked under "Business" for example.
It looks pretty interesting - been checking it out for a few days now and haven't decided whether it's a keeper or not.
Windows only, unfortunately. My biggest gripe with it to date is that I'm trying to wean myself off MS software, and this would lock me back in again.
At work, I use the category option within Outlook to assign categories to the various messages. Using the filters you can setup things to automatically categorize information. In your example you could assign the category as: Vendor, Projectname You could then group and sort your email with one click by clicking on the Category Column. I group my email in this fashion and do not have to use the Search feature that often. I get around 400 messages per day - from various projects I manage and system status messages (another 200-300 statuses get automatically deleted if there is no warning or failure key word in them)... My .02
I put everything in "My Documents" and "My Pictures" and "Favorites", just like I'm supposed to. Clippy wouldn't have told me to do it that way if it weren't the best way to work.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I just print out every single email and dump them on my desk!
Lately the pile marked "Your details" has been getting pretty heavy...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
"In a flat-text file, with grep to look stuff up. The way God intended it to be."
Of course, I spend probably 99% of my time in console mode (high-res framebuffer actually) and prefer to use Lynx and small unix tools (and Perl, lots of Perl) to get shit done. Old mail just gets deleted. The only stuff that's important enough for me to keep around is server backup files and any source code I might be working on, and those get versioned (with RCS) and burned to cdrom every couple months. I have a TOC (flat text file) on the cdroms and also keep a copy of each TOC on my hard disk for fast lookup (with grep, of course).
I think MIT has a project called Haystack designed just for this
I've been thinking about creating a set-based file system. Instead of things being in hierarchal directories, each file is a member of one or more sets. While finding a file, you can specify one or more sets to which that file belongs, rather than trying to drill down a specific directory tree.
/home/username, you could have sets /home and /home/username, the latter of which would be defined to be a subset of home, so that all files belonging to the set /home/username immediately belong to /home!
:).
For example:
You have an e-mail sent to you from your friend Bob about his dog last month. You could place it in the following sets:
email
bob
dog
august
2003
boring
Say sometime later you remember Bob sent you something boring during the month of August. Simply select the following sets in your file selection box:
bob
august
boring
And voila! You have all the boring e-mails from Bob in the month of August.
Because of the mathematical nature of sets, many more operations can be performed, such as unions and stuff.
The neato thing is, hierarchal directory structures are a direct subset of sets: To emulate the structure
Set filesystems can still be access via heirarchal means, too: A set file system driver on something like Linux would have a fixed, single-level directory structure consisting of all the sets (as directories). Accessing 'subfolders' would cause dynamic name binding to those set intersections.
Set filesystems also can be extremely useful for database structures (especially when implemented like ReiserFS!) but I won't get into that here
Have always baffled me. Do I put my dividend statements in Shares, or current FY tax return?
Do I file a report on tyres under tyres, or the project I wrote it for?
Answer, in practice: whichever I feel like.
(note $HOME should not be your desktop - your ~/Desktop ~/Mesa ~/Bureau or whatever you call it should be *inside your $HOME* - like in the real world) ....
/usr/local/var/$USERNAME but still end up using:
After that anything goes:
I've tried namazuing everything; making the ~/ part of a Zope Data.fs located in
find ~/
ls -tal | grep
grepmail
I keep all my Mail in ~/IMAP and can find anything in mere seconds. I do save e-mail as separate files sometimes in ~/Docs/en/Saved_Mail
My Docs directory:
Docs/
|-- en
| |-- Dissertation
| |-- Images
| | |-- Backgrounds
| | |-- Icons
| | `-- Photos
| |-- Papers
| | |-- Mine
| | `-- OtherPeoples
| |-- Reference
| | |-- BSD
| | |-- Economics
| | | `-- IT_and_New_Economy
| | |-- Environment
| | |-- Links
| | | `-- Slashdot
| | |-- Linux
| | `-- Unix
| `-- Saved_Email
|-- es
| `-- mensajes
`-- fr
`-- Courriel_sauvegarde
Back in the day, BeOS dumped all the messages in one folder with each message as a separate file (like Maildirs) and used file attributes to add any label (or set of labels) you'd like.
1.msg [ classification=Spam ]
2.msg [ classification=Inbox,classification=Spam ]
The desktop interface let you sort out files based on their attributes. Better e-mail clients also understood some of the common file attributes.
Linux now has attribute based filesystems that are getting mature - it should be possible to do something similar.
A DYI solution, but what on Linux isn't? (:
This is not a revolutionary idea by any means. But it subtly changes how you access emails by turning folders into views. You aren't really changing the data you're looking at, you're just changing how you're looking at it. To be honest, this doesn't really seem terribly interesting to me for email; I've never felt a need for a system like the OP describes. But I use it a lot for stuff like photos, MP3s, and other multimedia that resists straightforward categorization.
In directories, silly.
www.thebrain.com
It has an interesting way of organizing data - and you can link any data item from multiple places. It is a very interesting idea and I have played with it some. It can link to Lotus notes messages as well.
One disadvantage is that (besides the Windows platform) that it is the entire environment you'll "live in", with your data. I bought it at work and tried it out, and the first impressions are good. If the company has a broadbased support and widespread adoption, I'd probably use it, because at work we seem to be keeping the M$ platform for at least a few more years.
You can check out the personal version free of charge - download from the website.
outlook 2003 is damn good and since its in the family it works well with the rest of the relatives ;)
keep everything on your desktop, when its all too much, make a new dir (folder) and call it "crap", move everything into it. When your desktop is full again, make a folder called stuff, and put everything on your desktop in it (including the dir called "crap". Once your desktop if full again, make a dir (folder) and call it "crap", put everything on your desktop in it (including the "stuff" dir (folder))... you get the idea.
For e-mail, well, that's not a problem, it has infinite surface area...
Nah, I store everything in /dev/random.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
We got a call last week by a customer that was having problems with mail.app (OS X email app) getting "poor performance". Come to find out she, and most everyone at her company, had upwards of 2000 emails in EACH mail folder, and they had many mail folders.
Somewhat at a loss for good ideas, I suggested she try Enterage. That's apparently what they used to use, until they broke its limit of a 2mb index, at which point Enterage crashes.
Sheeeeeeesh. Some people just don't know what it means to keep a clean email inbox. But in her case, their business revolves around receiving customer email, and they're already keeping their mailboxes trimmed down.
Is there any email app for OS X that can handle "industrial" needs?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Actually, the only reason I still use pine is because it allows me to file my messages so easily. Drag 'n' Drop doesn't cut it with my filing system. Do any (Linux) GUI mail clients support keyboard shortcuts to save mail into a folder hierarchy like this? Anyone want to bring me out of the early '90's? Anyone?
Just use mh (or more likely nmh) and emails are files and hardlinks work just fine for putting an email in multiple folders.
And get an actually usable mail handling system as well...
Ted Nelson's ZigZag system is a new way to store related data without resorting to a relational database. At first glance, it seems really goofy. This is usually an indication (to me, anyway) that it either really is completely goofy, or brilliant beyond my comprehension. Given Nelson's record, I'm inclined toward the latter.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Check out Opera's M2 email client. It uses one massive "received" box and then the emails are distributed, well not actually moved but sorted, into different "views". It is a radical approach to email sorting. Messages from contacts will show up next to their names and also in and of the views you like. You can sort your email in many diffrent ways. You can set one view for, in my case "financial", where all my bank and dreaded credit card stuff goes, and also by "bank" and "credit card". It took a while to get used to but I LOVE IT.
"If this is a sig, and sigs are for losers, then I am a loser..."
>
How do you manage files, email, contacts, meetings and all the relationships that might exist between them?
>
I don't. Like most people I keep track of what's actually important in my head, and discard the rest.
This includes the employment resume of people like you.
Raves for the product are universal among those who've met it.
Unfortunately, NetManage bought Arabesque (a brilliant Microsoft billionaire's spinoff--one of the original "Baby Bills"), and then unfortunately NetManage managed it right into shelf-ware, unwilling to open source the product, sell it, or give it any sort of life.
Why can't more companies do something more socially worthwhile than relegating a first-rate winning product to a slow death on the shelf when they are worried about not being financially competitive? It's been like 7 or 8 years since the last release. Sheesh!
I tend to organise my mail by who it is from or who I am having the conversation with. If I am having the conversation with several people, I put the email into the folder with the person who started the conversation.
If there is product specific stuff that I want to put in more than one place, I tend to copy it to text or word or whatever format docs and save it into folders.
Now I am entirely dependant on filters to store stuff into the right folder. Usually all that is left in the inbox is spam or new contacts.
There are things for sales or support staff called "contact managers" or "customer resource managers" (CRM), which let you link up documents and mail and even records of phone conversations and reminders in a more intuitive fashion. I've yet to decide which one is best even though I've spent months trying to figure it out. I guess it is too far away from how I work as a programmer (mostly). There are these ones for example: Le Grand
ACT!
Microsoft have one that they got from Great Plains software
And there is one unix based one that I know of in Finland! Nemein Hmm, having trouble getting it to load but it was there last January. Try looking for Nemein.Net Sales just to prove I'm not imagining it review
Anyway I think some of those things are completely over the top but if your email systems are out of control they may help.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
For me, the folder is just as important as the colour it is. Most gui based mail clients allow for rules, so, I have several rules to sort my inbox to different folders, and also some to make e-mails from certain domains (my college for one) show up a certain colour (oh, lets say dark green).
I also (used to) assign certain sounds to certain people (at one point I got so many e-mails from my friend jeff that I had recorded myself saying 'hey jeff' and that sound would play whenever I got an e-mail from him), but sounds became too obnoxious for both me and my roommates (although it is still an often overlooked valid option).
--CPM
---You're all I need, When the water runs deep, You're all I need, Now I cry my soul to sleep -- Collective Soul, Needs
By giving everything to CowboyNeal. Duuuuh! Pay attention!
Please help metamoderate.
I organize my data by remembering good keywords for Google searches.
It's just undocumented.
See this nice app here which set itself as a shell extension. I use it extensively and it works wonder for organizing music, photos, etc.
Intelligence shared is intelligence squared.
Lotus Notes does this 'virtual folder' filing you mention, placing a single email in different folders. While Notes isn't perfect, and nothing is, at least it does this and quite a few other things very well. And pays no attention to the many Outlook virii.
BeOS used file attributes and file system queries to organize data. Longhorn's WinFS is built on this concept. The real question isn't how to organize your files, it's why does your data need to be in files? Why are folders so closely entwined with our computing experience? This type of grouping is best suited for your clothes in your dresser. In real life, tossing everything into a pool and pulling out what you need by characteristics ("attributes") is much more useful.
There's always The Brain (thebrain.com) which has a pretty high geek factor but works on a fairly simple premise that data can be organized many different ways in ones brain and provides paths to information based on those associations.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
the need for relational databases.
Now if only someone would make one.
KFG
While I don't use it, I beleive Opera 7's mail client is designed to allow you to do just that. You can create as many categories as you like, and any given email may belong to any combination of them.
A friend at work waits until his Inbox is over quota (MS Exchange). Then, he'll create a folder called "File Later X" where X is some incrementing number, and move the contents of his inbox to there. So he has several folders: FileLater1, FileLater2, FileLater3, etc.
First, email:
.Net, ASP, PHP, My SQL, Delphi, Outlook, MS Word, etc. all rolled into one. It can link a single email into multiple folders since Notes 3 in 1995.
Get Lotus Notes. I am a Domino evagelist. It is my god! I will spare you the details, but the Domino server and Notes client is the same as
Next Filesystem:
Linux boxes are highly organized already so for Win/Dos/OS2 systems:
Create an OS partition. Only install the OS and patches and device drivers here.
Create an Application partition. Install all applications in a heirarchy starting with Apps and Games and branch apps into Office, Development, Graphics, Utils, MediaPlayback, etc.
Create a Data partition. Create a \Data and a \Temp. Under TEMP put a Downloads, CDBurnoff, Ripping, Testing, and Receipts & Status. Under Data put Documents, Media, Source, Settings, and Pictures.
That should get you started. Create a catalog.txt file and put it on your desktop with notes about where everything should go. Good luck scaling up to 200 GB and keeping your head from exploding!!
SCO: 800-726-8649
Verisign: 800-361-8319, 888-642-9675
Diebold: 800-433-VOTE (8683)
It helps to have a filesystem designed with Database features in mind (ie. just like the BeOS file system). Emails are stored as normal files, with attributes like To, From, Title etc stored in the database. The same concept can be used for media files (MP3 attributes are stored into the database). When you wish to search your data, you can write queries, which are live on the BeOS, and have the results displayed in a directory window.
:-) have been using this feature for years now...
It's rather awkward to explain, but it works amazingly well in practice. Once you've tried it, you realise that there is no need to store data in directories, just make sure that the attributes are up-to-date, and finding any file is a query away. Rumour has it that Windows will adopt a similar system in Longhorn. Yeah, we BeOS users (all 20 of us
Revolution = Evolution
The more I thought about this, the more I realised that trees (such as the Windows filesystems) are not really ideally suited for organizing data.
Right. Unlike the way Unix organizes files in a totally non-hierarchal manner.
*rolling eyes*
I think this is a step in the right direction. I have been using it for a while now - check it out.
"The goal here is to do for email (starting with your personal mailbox) what Google did for the web... The Google principle: It doesn't matter where information is because I can get to it with a keystroke. So what is Zoe? Think about it as a sort of librarian, tirelessly, continuously, processing, slicing, indexing, organizing, your messages. The end result is this intertwingled web of information. Messages put in context. Your very own knowledge base accessible at your fingertip. No more "attending to" your messages. The messages organization is done automatically for you so as to not have the need to "manage" your email. Because once information is available at a keystroke, it doesn't matter in which folder you happened to file it two years ago. There is no folder. The information is always there. Accessible when you need it. In context." ZOE
I'm fond of the deleted folder. Simplify; I shit you not.
At boilerbay.com there's a great email indexer/categorizer that displays folders as the result of complex queries and can republish as a mail server to local groups. Naturally, an email can be in more than one folder if it matches multiple queries. It's fast and self-published for a pittance by the guy who patented the algorithms 12 years ago. see http://boilerbay.com. But it lacks a hook for spam filters (so I use a proxying filter) and my mom won't be using it until it gets an easy-to-use interface. It would be nice to have a shared repository of canned queries, too!
As a Mac user, I rely -- live in -- on a product called Boswell for my e-mail contacts, appointments, research, and writings.
It works with imported text files (for my e-mail), pasted text (stuff I find on the Web) and lets you create text within it (I _am_ going to finish that novel someday). Everything you create can go in multiple categories and they can go in them _automatically_.
And everything is searchable by multiple criteria -- time, content, and how it is already categorized. There are no hierarchies or links. With the searches it does, you' don't need them.
Their site is at www.boswell.com.
I put all e-mails in one folder and if I need to find anything I use grepmail:
http://grepmail.sourceforge.net/
If you have OS X check out Zoe:
http://guests.evectors.it/zoe/
I came to a similar conclusion that categorical folders don't work. The email clients I use support good searching capabilities. So what I've been doing for some time with a Cyrus IMAP server is having an archive folder per year that store all email I wish to save. If I need to look something up, I don't have to manually search for the right folder. Mail clients aren't good that that. But they are good at searching for messages within a folder.
I used to beta this thing by this company called Autonomy which would sort and sift all your (and everyone elses) cruft to assemble a list of relevant links (to your stuff and others) in response to your activities.
;-)
IMO it did this in real-time, must have made for some impressive indices.
Maybe this is the answer, open-source Autonomy. I am a mere perlmonks acolyte so I will leave it up to the real brains to figure it out
How do you manage...email...and all the relationships that might exist between them?
"To Do" and "Done"
Get off your @$$ and do it.
My Documents and then according to category. My Pictures, My Drivers, My Porn Videos, My Pirated Software, My...
You get the picture. Don't forget to lock everything from your roommate's access privileges. It's *my* porn.
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
When I want to find something, I
Hey, it's all in there.
Six Degrees from Creo is designed to deal with this issue. I've tried it and find it useful now and then.
www.creo.com/sixdegrees
There's probably some system where you can assign key words to your files and then throw them all around and just have quick search things, kind of like on Kazaa or whatever. You know, just have a field of possilbe searches and click on one, it brings up anyting with a keyword that matches.
Any way tha tyou do it things are going to take up more time. I really odn't save much e-mail, but you could probably just change the file name to add whatever thing you want it to show up with and use search protacols for it.
You're not yet entirely clear on this "geek" thing, I think
thebrain (www.thebrain.com) could be used, or at least something like it, to handle this. Basically, everything is treated as a thought and can have multiple parents, siblins, childern.
I've always classified thebrain as 'really neat', but not very usable. Once you put a lot of information into it, the interface becomes difficult to use. But the concpet is still sound.
I have a large storage. I found that if you want to organize anything without symbolic links you must stick with a strict model. In my root I organize any platform specific applications and others into platform named directories. (eg: Win32, Linux, MAC, Palm, PPC, etc...) I also have directories called Incoming, ISOs, Media, and Projects I also have a seperate share for my, and my wifes user profiles.
Under the Win32 folder I have a scheme of Applications, Gaming, Drivers, Servers, etc... Under Linux I have a scheme similar to Source, Binaries, Modules, etc...
Once I decided on that organization model it was really easy to just keep expanding the same principle to subdirectories.
You talk better than you fool!
I don't use evolution myself at the moment (currently preferring mozilla-mail for some weird reason) but vfolders are supposed to be good at handling your kind of situation, where you want to classify certain mails in more than one way. Just put everything in a big archive folder and have various vfolders set up to categorise mail in different ways.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Not sure if this has been mentioned (probably has), but the new Longhorn release of Windows is supposed to be shipped with a new file system (WinFS) which does exactly what you need. It (again, all just theory right now) will work by using a SQL database instead of a FAT table. This means you can now classify files.
So you'll access a "folder" which basically has a list of properties, and all files with those properties will be show. So if I want all my pictures from my vacation to hawaii, as well as my monthly financial reports, I'd create a folder that "contains" all files on those subjects, and whenever I accessed that folder it'd show me all files that fit those catagories. But on the same hand I can have another "folder" which shows me just my vacation pictures.
I randomize my data!
Hay does no one use nin slyblic links these days? Sure symbolic link accross that file system, but you REALLY wantb two copies of the same thing? Yes a realy link.
unix syntax: ln
James
All the problems everyone has mentioned - it solves. All of them. And the email organisation issue just highlights whats wrong with your *entire* file system. So if you don't know what zigzag is time to find out because its going to be with us very, very soon.
Ok, now to actually answer the question posed here (as opposed to what a lot of other people here are doing, which is either come up with something witty or else attempt to codify a sweeping new all-inclusive whiz-bang OS change).
Ahem.
I know the question is asking about emails, files, contacts, and meetings, but as I keep relatively few contacts permanently filed and don't much like meetings, I'll address what I do about files and emails.
Files: I start with a simple folder: "Files". In my case, "D:\Files". (I like folders Windows doesn't much know about, nor mess with.) Inside that, I have pretty much a heterogeneous hodgepodge of hierarchies of folders: "Projects", "Photos", "Temp" (big one, that), etc. Nothing earth-shattering.
Emails: I try to organize these into folders denoting conversational thread ("Buddies", "List Stuff", "Family", "Work", etc.), combined with where they are in my email-processing conveyor belt ("To Do" (I haven't replied yet), then "Transfer" (I've replied, but not archived), then "Done" (archived and ready for deletion)), for whichever conversational threads I want to save. Using the examples above would result in:
- List Stuff
- Work
- To Do - Buddies
- To Do - Family
- Transfer - Buddies
- Transfer - Family
- Done - Buddies
- Done - Family
(I would use a bit of hierarchy here, like:- List Stuff
- Work
- To Do
- Buddies
- Family
- Transfer
- Buddies
- Family
- Done
- Buddies
- Family
, except Yahoo! Mail doesn't allow folder nesting. (And before you laugh at me for using Yahoo! Mail, can you access your mail at any web browser anywhere? How many times have you changed addresses in the last 5 years? I haven't at all.))And that's pretty much it.
(Hey, you asked...)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I have pondered the same thing. Being a relational fan, I of course lean toward sets instead of (or in addition to) trees. Here is my webpage describing various post-tree approaches and interfaces:
http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/sets1.htm (I know, geocities sucks, but there are too many links to it already to switch.)
Table-ized A.I.
I know other users have already pointed out how well Evolution works for sorting mail, but I just wanted to attest to how well it works even for large amounts of email.
I used to create new folders for specific types of email, but I found it very difficult to manage and search all the folders after a while, so I ended up moving all of my email to a single folder, Inbox. I currently have 24,949 messages in my Inbox and Evolution is still extremely fast when it comes to sorting and searching through them all.
I also make use of the excellent VFolders feature of Evolution, to save frequent searches into their own folders. I've been using Evolution now for several years, and it just keeps getting better and better.
--It's Pimptastic!--
Personally, I think /dev/hole would be cool, even if it was a link to /dev/null.
Nobody has mentioned seaching? Why? Why waste the time sorting?
Just keep every email. (trust me it will save your ass) Use search/find.
Basically, the chronological order works best. Keep everything, it's a lot easier that way.
I don't know about you guys, but I don't have the time to "classify/sort/delete/is this important?/i don't think this is important(as soon as you delete, you screw yourself)" my emails. If you have time, your time should probably be spent somewhere else, not "classifying" and "sorting".
It's one thing to let the system sort using rules based on subject/sender/etc. It's quite another to do it by hand. Move on. You need to be working on more important tasks.
Thank you 3M.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
When searching for something, I usually know who sent it to me (or what kinds of mails I generally get from X). For all other cases, grep is my friend.
Interestingly enough, there's no easy way to do this extremely simple thing (save by sender) in the GUI mail readers I've tried (Mozilla, Evolution, etc.), they make you drag-and-drop the email to a folder - try doing that when you have 200+ folders to choose from... (and don't tell me about Evolution and vfolders, I have years worth of email organized this way and I like it, dammit!)
For file systems I use symbolic links in a column viewed filesytem. I really like what a company formerly known as NeXT has done with some of their products. Their software for pictures and music both have a "Library". From there you can drag songs or pictures into "Playlists" (music) or "Albums" (photos).
Very cool.
As for software, I use OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner from OmniGroup. OmniOutliner is especially simple, yet unique. I wonder why no one else has an idea organizer that is so incredible? I couldn't do my job without it. Well, I could, but I'd use a lot of paper or spend a lot of time in OpenOffice messing around with things.
IMHO, tree structures work best for people who don't mind branching structures that sound illogical, just so every branch has at least a few files in the end folders. For example, if you have e-mail relating to 10 programs you use, and you are comfortable lumping 8 or so filed e-mail docs in "freeware" because that's all you have there, and then not making folders for "shareware" and "commercial software", but organizing those by company because you have an average of five files per company there, then tree view can work for you. If you 'have' to make folders by company for each company once you start with that method, and a lot of those folders end up containing only 1 or 2 documents each, you aren't really gaining productivity by being more 'logical'. It looks neat and organized, but you end up with a number of folders = or > than the files, and so it requires as much mental effort as looking at a single list of files, unsorted. Possibly you could set a goal, like my directory structure should look only about 1/4 as complex as the raw filenames all viewed together, or each folder should have at least 3 items in it, but no more than 12.
Who is John Cabal?
We use lotus notes at our organisation and I find it a great email client (for corporate mail). It has great folder support, there's only one document in the database, but it can be displayed in any number of folders. There's also the views which are defined by the admin which show what they're told. This means that you might remove a document from all folders, but still be able to find it in All Documents.
The only down side to Notes is that it's quite expensive, but it does run on Linux *grins*
Z
Most schemes for organizing information just result in more folders that need organizing. I think we can learn a thing or two from meatworld systems... like libraries.
I use faceted classification to name my folders. Specifically, I use a variant of Ranganathan's Colon Classification. Each folder has four facets applied to it: Matter, Energy, Space, and Time. Ranganathan also specified a Personality facet but I can never figure it out. Instead, I assign a proper noun. The Time facet is also redundant given the time stamp on the files. Instead, I replace Time with Stage.
So, here's a typical folder name for a sales project I'm working on:
Personality- Smith (name of company)
Energy- Sales (activity related to contents)
Matter- Presentation
Space- Montreal
Time- Stage 3
The resulting folder name is: Smith_presentation_sales_montreal_3
It looks like ass, but it works pretty well since the facets are semantically orthogonal. The syntax makes searching and sorting pretty simple.
Good luck!
For me, I find that the ideal way to organize things would be a combination of folders, piles, and stored searches (or virtual folders). While folders don't always meet my need, I still find that they are a perfect starting or ending point for information. Say if I'm starting to research on "Small World Networks", I almost always start by creating a folder, to place collected data. But while researching, I often find the need for saved states--its one of the primary reasons why I enjoy tabbed browsing. Being able to quickly saved 5 or 20 open sites, and then go back to them is just great.
The concept of piles, I love as well, the ability to just quickly dump things into piles of interest, that can be later organized better, is a great concept. Typically when something is active it need to be related to lots of other things, and for me the piles concept allows this. Of course this brings me to stored searches.
I find I used the concept of stored searches like data mining. I typically do it for past projects, or to gain new insight on past experiences. I remember Sherlock use to allow you to save search criteria as a clickable link that would then rerun and update the results when selected. I don't think the new version does, but I am hoping that Apple will introduce the opportunity to do so, when they start making improvements on the new finder to be introduced in Panther.
When I had a NetBSD box, I put everything is a single directory called "~/.Files". I then created directories in home, such as "MP3", "Photos", and "Letters", each containing symbolic links to items in "~/.Files".
NOTE: For my home directory, I always capitalize the first character of directory names while using all lowercase characters for file names. I know it's weird but it's a convention that I like using.
Just let Domino Domain Indexer index your filesystem (I used to index 159GB of data on a SGI XFS system in about 24 hour) and then use the FullText search to find it!
The Domain Indexer easy crawls throuw your FS and is able to index eaven binary data (PDF, DOC, XLS, etc... but no SWX, SWC, etc)
And when you delete a message from one folder, it's deleted from all of them!
If you are deleting an email, that implies that you are done with the information. If you just want to reorganize it, then you (the user) should understand what it means to organize.
The problem is that users are trained on the MS vision that everything can only exist in one place and to put it in two places requires making a copy. This approach has problems:
1. Very wasteful of hard drive space. You need to have complete copies of a document in every folder/directory it belongs. Today hard drive space is cheap, but MS is trying to grow the data file sizes to keep up.
2. Each copy is not updated with the others. You usually forget which should be the master copy. And the users don't care about maintaining the master copy; they want to work on the one to which they have access. Making it read-only means there will be even more copies made so people can get their work done.
Unix/Linux users have symbolic links. They are exposed to them very early, and learn that a link to a file can be treated as the file, for everything except its organization. Updating the file updates it everywhere.
Lotus Notes allows all approaches:
1. You can make copies. Copy/Paste always does this.
2. You can make links. Dragging always does this.
3. You can put links to anything inside other documents. This allows you to send a memo with links to the documents that need your attention.
4. You have Views, which show all documents based on selection formulas.
5. It has great filtering capabilities. You can show all documents that contain the word "slashdot" that were created between 2 dates.
But is a first-time user going to expect it? Of course not, he thinks the folders work like everywhere else, and copy means make a copy, not just a link.
Your "first-time user" expects "the folders work like everywhere else"?
- A first-time user should not have a problem. They learn what happens without any expectations.
- A "first-time user" that has been using MS products for a while should know never to expect consistent results. Try dragging a file in MSWindows:
1. If it is an executable, it will create a Shortcut.
2. If it is to the same hard drive, it will move the file. (And remember that "My Documents" and "Desktop" are usually on the C Drive.)
3. If it is to a different hard drive, it will make a copy. (What happens if it is a mapped network share on the same computer?)
That is 3 different results from the same user action! So how do folders work everywhere else?
---
Anyway, I expect MS to die soon. Windows will wither without MS. The next generation of users will probably start with Linux and be better off.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Virtual folders have been in Evolution for years. Mod parent up please!
One simple rule for its versus it's
This is not an email organizer. But for any other kind of hierarchical data.. its pretty good.
http://keynote.prv.pl/
It doesn't matter how you organize your data. Just make sure you delete all items that haven't been accessed for more than six months and sixty six days.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
rm -fr *
No more muss, no more fuss. Everything is stored in the simplest format ever!Over the years, I will switch email clients.
Eudora. Evolution. Mail.app, ???
Also, perhaps Mutt, pine.. sometimes it's over imap.. sometimes it's local.
In the end.. I tend to keep things in an mbox format because ti's the most portable... but it still causes problems.
Ideally, what I would like to see is a server-side system that used standard mbox files, but perhaps had creative ways of indexing them externally, or slicing them up into pieces if they get too large. IMAP works well, but not well enough.. I want to be able to search remotely. I don't want to have to worry about what's on the client.
Ideally, we need a new, remote reading protocol, and a solid server to back it up. This could also, of course, run locally if you want your mail local.. that's neither here nor there... we need a mail storage, retrieval, and archiving engine that interoperates wiht stadnard mail clients.
For now, I'll settle for a system where current mail is available from my mail client (Mail.app), and archived mail is accessed via a web based system.
Put everything in a CMS (Plone/Zope) is one of the best *potential* not yet out of the box CMS and workgroup system since there is not a quality email system, but promising.
That's actually quite amusing, thanks! It's like using "pulchritude" correctly and misusing "the."
"But seriously, this subject is kind of lacking. The problem I have with organized storage is keeping it organized. I don't have the time nor the will. I need some sort of automagic organization."
Get a secretary/significant other (sometimes the same person).
All my email comes into either my personal or work account. Apple Mail.app merges them when I read them, plus allows for full text searching.
:)
Every month I take the month before-last's inbox and archive it onto my iBook (Pull it off the IMAP server) then copy it onto my iPod for my offsite backup
My work email gets put into a folder for year > Month > Inbox or Sent or Responded
"Responded" is just copies of any helpdesk email that I responded to for accountability.
All of that is on my work network drive which gets backed up nightly.
For Windows users, an option I have looked at the past (but admittedly never tried out; trialing The Brain sent me off on a tangent...) is Zoot, a type of "Information Management Software". It is essentially a large relational database into which you can store and organize almost any type of document, email, URL, etc.
The only thing I'm a bit worried about is the last release version appears to have been released in 2000; nonetheless, the software continues winning awards. They have a free trial version available if you want to give it a spin.
that's *MY* system. You stole it. I want money.
I've been hoping for some stroke of genius to hit so I can easily go through all the nested crap and clean stuff up... but disk space is too cheap.
For example, to find all the TeX files containing a certain keyword, use:OrFor mail in particular, I find a good organization is to keep mail and junk mail in separate folders and move them to a separate archive folder annually. All other "organization" can be done easily when needed using searching, sorting, saved searches ("virtual folders"), highlighting, and features like that. (Incidentally, sorting is very powerful for organization in mailers and other places: select an example of the message you want and then "sort by" something like author or subject to find related messages in the index.)
Many domains already have conventions or tools. For example, software source trees are organized in particular ways. And things like address and customer data are commonly stored in databases (on top of the file system).
Just don't believe anyone telling you that there is a magic bullet for this. Some OS vendors have rediscovered attributed file systems and databases-as-file-systems, but those create more problems than they solve. Ultimately, data organization is a conceptual problem, not a technological one, and throwing more features at it doesn't solve it.
Anything I think I'll need to use again, I copy over to StickyBrain. You can set up multiple hotkey combinations to copy into different main categories within StickyBrain from any other application. Once it's in there, StickyBrain has a lot of options for coding and viewing information different ways, and an integral browser feature that allows you flip through your sorted/selected entries as easily as surfing the web.
There are two things to organize:
1. Mail (which in itself contains lots of documents)
2. Other files (docs, mp3's, etc)
For mail - I used to have a server online at the ISP where I worked, when that job ended, I moved the server to a cable-modem connection.
I use FreeBSD on the server, I have a pretty extensive procmail filter which first runs things through spambayes, then puts every e-mail into:
a. A file in LISTS dir specific to a mailing list I'm subscribed to
2. A file in PEOPLE dir named with first letter of first name follwed by last name (or just whatever preceeds @ if no name is available). I also have the ability to adjust a specific e-mail address to a folder name. This is done via a Python script invoked from procmail. It shouldn't be hard to write one.
Mainly I use pine from command line, but I can always access the server via IMAP. I make sure that only SSL IMAP is enabled (this used to be done by making imapd listen on the loopback, but these days imapd supports that out-of-the-box)
The docs are kept in my home directory, organized by more or less understandable scheme.
I also have a CVS repository in my home directory, and I try to keep as much stuff as I can checked into it, but so far I've been lazy about that. Ultimately, I'd like to keep every doc in CVS, and perhaps copy the CVS tree to a CD every once in a while.
The mp3's are mostly on my laptop - I don't care if I loose them cause all of them are from my CD's or other recreatable sources.
grisha.org
In my home directory I have a bunch of files, but they are all in neat folders like: work, school, download. These in turn contain subfolders according to my employers, classes and types of downloaded files, respectively.
As a program to access stuff fast I use the ROX Filer. That is the fastest for organizing with a nice graphical representation of stuff (unless you want to use commandline that is).
just my 2 cents.WinFS is the first approach i've seen that attempts to use relational database as an actual file system. Hopefully they'll get it right.
BeOS solved this ages ago.
media
documents
tmp
There are other directories here and there including some more personal subclasification of documents but those catch about everything for files
For email I mainly have filters set up to filter to discrete directories by mailing list it comes from, email address they are sent to, and spam headers.
I do security
What, you thought there was more?
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
Any email which is important I send to one or more anal-retentive people who will create nice organized folders in which to store the email.......Good luck! Staying organized is a full time job!
Being geeks, we are all looking for technical solutions. But perhaps part of the problem is a labor issue: organization is not free. I remember a manager who wanted a "self organizing" system to classify, inspect, and clean documents (preparation for auto-indexing). Beyond key-word searches, it required man-power (or women-power of course), but he did not want to pay for that. GIGO is alive and well. They eventually tossed his ass out after two false starts buying into vendor hype of magic technology doing his thinking for him.
Hmmmmm. If we can use up all the $2/hr third world labor on document classification, then perhaps programming won't be flooded anymore.
Table-ized A.I.
Instead of folders, use categories. You can have multiple categories per message.
Ms Entourage v.X allows you to set links between any of its objects. It also allows you to set more than one category per item, and you can setup custom views to combine these at your leisure. The links are great because on top of the obvious linking to the contacts, you can link to tasks, calendar events, notes. etc.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
What a mess:
Customer A
- Vendor 1
- Contact m
- Contact s
- Contact t
- Vendor 2
- Contact m
- Contact s
- Contact a
- Contact b
etc etc. Problem is you have to remember a lot of information. My boss could never find anything without a lot of handholding if he had to look something up in my email if I was at lunch, on the road or whatever. All corespondance is sorted by date. Too bad the 2GB limit for saved emails keeps getting in the way of my arhive. *sigh*
--
m = main
s = secondary
t = tertiary
a = alpha
b = beta
Parent folders (Vendor 1/2 or Customer A) are for random emails associated with people that are not normal for me to have contact with (secretary, temp, warehouse guy, whatever).
This problem is the leading principal and primary downfall of a heirachial based system, file or otherwise. Information (not data) has to be classified. No matter how you think you can slice or dice the information up, someone will always come along and be able to shuffle your apples into different baskets. Taxonomy of systems is something you can write (and read) reams of tomes on. Take it from someone who has been down the road of "should I file this in folder a or folder b?" and "where should folder a be in the heiarchy?". The problem is that you're tied to a flat system with pretty much all file, mail and inbox managers you can think of. Someone needs to do something smart with how you organize information, not data, which is how Outlook, KMail, and pretty much every PIM, mail and information "organizer" works.
The solution? Unfortunately for a file system (sans symbolic links) or an inbox you're stuck with the traditional system of folders inside of folders. What needs to happen (and if anyone wants to engage me to build this I'm all for it) is to construct a system that allows dynamic categorization of information in a way that makes sense to the user, not the program. Two things have to happen to make this easy. First, the ability to create categories and sub-categories and sub-sub-categories til you're blue in the face. Create an upper level category of languages and split it down into C, C++, Perl, etc. Then create an upper level category of compilers and split it down into MSC, Borland, GCC, etc. until you get the "trees" of information you want. Second is when you file information, file it anyway you want (in one big location if that's your thing) but then categorize it in one or more areas and store that as META data with the object (e.g. a snippet of UNIX C code for email could go into C, UNIX, and email if you had those categories). Now when you do a search, return the result set from your location of the data but grouped by category and sorted whatever way works for you. Now you can filter by inclusion/exclusion of categories etc. and move information around without worrying about where it is.
Well, in a nutshell not the greatest revelation anyone had but at least it breaks the common mentality everyone has about putting object X in folder Z and having to know where it is to find it. Your mileage may vary.
The fact is, that you are quite likely to spend more time thinking of and accessing an elaborating filing system than you are to actually spend working. Work is just that, work... it happens to include reading email... period.
For non-email the problem is a bit harder. I categories roughly by workspace (home, work, friends) and then subtask. But I don't bother with crosslinks. There's any number of indexing tools on freshmeat for files.
Cameron Simpson, DoD#743 cs@cskk.id.au http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/
The more I thought about this, the more I realised that trees (such as the Windows filesystems) are not really ideally suited for organizing data. On UNIX-like filesystems, symbolic links allow the creation of simple graphs for organising data...
Windows DOES offer shortcuts which are analagous to ln -s
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
It's amusing how many of the schemes listed in this page can be neatly subsumed and correlated within the single word "Wiki."
Thanks, Ward. You're still the man.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
for example, I wish that netamnage's ECCO had been continued, updated, and expanded to handle email. This was, without a doubt, the greatest PIM I've ever used, and it's been without support for nearly five years and it's STILL the best.
If only Mitch Kapor's _Chandler_ project was Ecco reborn...
It's worked well for me and my tens of thousands of email messages.
Try the "Slashdot I-mail Classification Kludge Linkage Yielder" (SICKLY). Everything falls into one of these classifications:
1. Overrated
2. Underrated
3. Troll
4. Flame-bait
5. Profit!
Oh, and it only runs on a Beowulf Cluster of Linuxes (Lini?). And, don't ask how it runs in Soviet Russia.
Table-ized A.I.
I've got a directory archive of mail going back well into the 80's. The only detail about a given message I can usually count on remembering is the sender or recipient. I give each correspondent a separate subdirectory with the name of email alias (last name, sometimes with initials). I have a few special folders for "receipts," "strangers," and corporate spam. Special folders for specific topics have never worked out, mostly because topics overlap too heavily. Grep works fine for the rare cases where I remember the content but forget the correspondent.
(Reality reasserts itself sooner or later.)
You don't need to orgainze the email to be able to find it, you just need to be able to search it easily. I just split things off for mailing lists, not much else. Getting the computer to search the email for you is loads more efficient than spending your time organizing everything.
At work with Outlook/Exchange,
/. messages, they get auto removed from the Slashdot folder when they are 10 days old, same with messages to and from Ebay related addresses. Mailing lists are typically on a 30 day cycle. I'd love to find an autodelete old solution that I can configure once and run it via cron, then I would not have to rely on any specific IMAP client to do it for me.
I have some folders labeled:
Auto
--7Days
--Month
--4months
I put somewhat important mail in each of these, some automatically via filters. I set the archive funtion to delete the mail based on the folder name when it gets that old.
For things I want to keep, I use other folders.
At home I use IMAP, fetchmail and procmail so new mail always goes to the correct folders but I have never found a filter system that can run rules on mail already in standard mailbox based mail folders. My workaround has been Pegasus from Windows which connects via IMAP, I set filters to do the autodelete old crap on initial opening of a IMAP folder. An example being my
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I've gone through this too. Invariably, upon looking back on it, I've realized that I spent a bunch of time on organizing my inbox/personal network share/hard drive/car trunk/sock drawer that didn't really pay off...mostly because the system doesn't last if you only enforce it when your environment gets to be a pigsty.
The other thing I've noticed is that while it can't be justified on its own, that type of activity, for me anyway, usually means I am putting time into "getting organized" which usually has some other payoff.
For instance, I might remember some important due date while I shuffle crap on my desk trying to get "organized." The item I remembered usually has nothing to do with what is in my hand.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil
How do you manage files, email, contacts, meetings and all the relationships that might exist between them?
I use farVIEW for everything except for email. I would of course - I wrote it. You can dl a copy of it at paul.medlock.com if you want to try it. It only runs on Windows, though, I'm afraid.
Save ALL email in 1 folder and then search through it to find what you need. Organizing ahead of time is a BIG time waster. Computers were made to search anyway...
I should be able to link to one email from several folders
I do just that. My mail client is Ximian Evolution.
Somehow, I've always found it most useful to organize my work mail by sender. I gave up early on the "sort by topic" approach since email threads rarely stay on topic and can easily apply to multiple topics (e.g. "gee, I'll bet we'd find that bug in products x, y, and z, too"). On the other hand, I always remember who sent the email.
Maybe its some quirk of how my brain operates, but this has always seemed like the right mix of simple and organized to me.
For me any email over 2 years old is neatly organized in folders. After that I gave up and just keep everything in one folder and just sort by sender, subject, or date to find what I need. I have an easier time finding the stuff that is in one folder vs the stuff that is neatly organized. As one reader put it in another post, how do you know which folder to look in.
'Same speed C but faster'
Have a look at http://guests.evectors.it/zoe/
It is wonderfully easy to use, and does everything you want. Oh, it does take a bit of getting used to.
Evolution has addressed this with its email "VFolders" for some time; these act much like a saved search across all of your folders.
A simple example is creating a VFolder that will show all items flagged "Important", allowing you to immediately view and modify any such email. Any changes you make to messages within a VFolder applies to that actual message, wherever it resides, kind of like a hard-link.
I also have a handful of special-purpose folders that I move things into from time to time, but I basically don't throw away emails at all - they just get archived.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
I have been using keynote which stores text, pictures, and links in a hierarchy. It also has shortcuts for nodes. It is incredibly useful software. It's also gpl'd.
The problem is that is isn't multiuser, and that's what I needed at work. Hierarchys are horrible for organizing documents and information for a group. No one knows which node or branch to look under. In this case keeping infromation flat, but indexed and categorized is better. I created a php app, with docs and text stored in a database. Each doc can be tagged with more than one category. It seems to work well. Having the title and text searchable is a bonus.
It sounds like what you want is the file system from Windows Longhorn. As I understand it, it will be using SQL Server 2004 (Yukon) for the entire file system. It seems self-evident that using a relational database for all files would result in a single table for files, and a table of attributes, search terms, subjects, etc., so that a file could be found any number of ways.
This is pretty clearly a better system. The only thing that concerns me is that every existing set of programming-language file system tools expects to be working with directory trees, even if they do support different delimiter characters, name length limits, multiple vs. single roots (drive letters vs. '/'), etc. I expect they will include some sort of mapping to a traditional hierarchy, though, as VB will have just as much trouble with the new system as Java will.
News story about it (news.com)
I post all my emails to my website and search them with Google.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Maybe the client works out of the box. But the last time I looked (some years ago, I admit), you couldn't have a Notes database without a Domino server. And the server is definitely not trivial to set up.
They come in, wipe everything out, I move, change my name and start fresh.
I do this everytime there is a new Windows version, just so I don't have to decide between "full" or "upgrade".
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
You'll get another copy tomorrow!
The right usb sex toys come with one.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
ones and zeros, of course.
do you have a better idea?
I store my e-mail and digital camera photos by date. For me, the same system works well for both. (Granted it's not ideal.)
Example:
[+]1999
[+]2000
[+]2001
[-]2002
[-]January
[ ] New Years Day PICS
[ ] Birthday Party
[-]February
[ ] Valentines Day
[+]March
[+]April
[+]May
[+]June
[-]July
[ ] Indepdence Day
[+]August
[+]September
[+]October
[+]November
[-]December
[ ] Christmas
[+]2003
Files are named according to who I'm going out with and how I feel about her at the particular moment. It fairly secure,but it makes me want to kill when ever i have to open a file created between 1999-2002.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
- Keeping a master database "brain" of all of the RPG characters, players, and NPCs, along with web resources and useful files (e.g. PDFs of character sheets).
- A logical map of the corporate network, including routers, switches, and whatnot. Since the "thoughts" can be links, files, or just text, I set it so that opening a router "thought" will start a telnet session, a server thought starts a terminal server session to that server, etc. Those were purely arbitrary. The links between network devices are color-coded by type (T1, dialup, DSL, etc). The network admin about crapped himself when I showed him--and then appropriated it for his own use.
- Story aid. My wife likes to write, and she can link up characters, locations, events, and plot points in entirely arbitrary manners however she pleases.
It's worth playing with, and some may find it worth purchasing. If I used Windows more, I would.I'd still like to get into wikis, though. =)
I've used Opera's email client for a while, and am pretty happy with it. It provides what they call 'access points', which seem to be about the same conept as the above mentioned virtual folders. New access points can be created along with filtering criteria for each, and incoming email is assigned to one or more access points, if the filtering criteria match. I've found this to be a pretty powerful way of managing my email, since I can change the... well, the 'perspective' or angle, from which I look at my inbox. I can view email by contacts (sender addresses), unread, or any arbitrary access point I have created. That makes managing email, especially when having to assign email to several 'view points' in lack of a better term, based on several criteria, as described above.
Ok, now to actually answer the question posed here (as opposed to what a lot of other people here are doing, which is either come up with something witty or else attempt to codify a sweeping new all-inclusive whiz-bang OS change).
This is slashdot; what do you expect?
All the email, etc. goes into a file partition which combines indexing and primary storage.
Data can be searched for any string, in a few milliseconds, without the delays of scanning with grep or other search tools. Applications like statistical filters can get, eg, counts of a given string very quickly, or match incoming email against stored messages to identify the correct classification.
Actually, this doesn't exist yet, but I was working on some indexing algorithms a while ago and realized that it's feasible.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
I am also a database fan. However, I don't think non-geek users would take quickly to SQL to find stuff.
I have kicked around the idea of a "logic grid" for querying tablized stuff without a query language. Horizontal would represent "and" connections, and vertical would represent "or". A "not" box would be down at the bottom, along with other specialized things. Perhaps a date-range input box could be down there also for creation date and modification date (I did not consider dates in my write-up, which I linked to in a nearby message. Here is the link again).
IMO the hardest part is not the database setup itself, but creating "acceptable" user interfaces for it. Then again, are we talking about stuff for ourselves only, or for general office workers?
Table-ized A.I.
> I realised I was having trouble classifying each mail into one specific folder. I had the feeling I should be able to link to one email from several folders
Dude, I have the same problem with my porn. "Should I have a movie folder, or keep similar kinds together both images and movies?"
One of life's great mysteries...
.. for me at least. No matter how well I organize something, it will always be proven inefficient and when I'm in a rush, I'll never adhere to the format I choose. I have multiple servers, each with multiple disks, mount points, and nfs/smb exports.
The solution? I put something wherever the hell is convenient. Then.. and just try to guess this... I use this nifty thing called "find"!
It works.
Excellent feature idea in your post!
Email clients should provide a way to indicate how long to keep an email. For example in a windows app like Outlook you should be able to right click on an email and select from a list of things like 'keep 2 weeks', 'keep 1 month, 'keep forever'.
I vaguely remember someone telling me of a program that did a mail grep: it would do a grep, but message-based rather than line-based. If it found a match, it would show the headers (from, date, subject) so you could pick the ones that were likely matches.
I don't have a link, or even know if such a thing exists, but it sounds very useful for those of us who have plaintext mailfiles.
After a lot of vareity of putting stuff in folders I realised that my mind does not think
the same way while organising, as while looking for something. I never seem to find
the right folder when I want it.
So now I am using evolution, put all mails (except SPAM, CVS, Bug reports etc) in INBOX
folder and create virtual folders based on keywords. But most of my successful hits are
when I filter for keywords over this INBOX folder as I need info. Its works 90% of the time.
Infact another rule in conjunction to this: Never delete anything
I am next going to break my INBOX into separate folder for each 3-months and try doing the
filters over the whole set of inboxes.
DO NOT PANIC
The first content organization system that prevents slashdot duplicate articles wins :-P
Table-ized A.I.
I do believe that Longhorn is supposed to be trying to address precisely these kinds of information-classification/database issues. No clue how well they'll *do* at it, but even the fat and greedy are aware of this problem...
What I want is an OS (maybe by Mac 10.3.5) level meta-data browser/search engine, like the one that iTunes has.
I want to be able to give multiple lables to e-mail, documents, [just about everything], put them all in one big folder (or let the apps put them somewhere, like in iTunes).
Then I want to be able to create smartFolders (like the smartPlaylists in iTunes) which will filter and grab my meta-data for me.
That's my dream.
Have you given a thought to this guy's work? The links are funky because he moved servers, but PhotoSeek indexes documents as well. Not sure if this is what you're after, but it does a variety of formats and such.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The page shows the enterprise version of their software having won all sorts of prizes recently from various tech/sales/ad rags.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
Database that how
~ In Trust, We Trust ~
I was not really asking for help. I am in the habit of ALWAYS right-button dragging when using MSWindows. That way I can choose what I want it to do regardless of the situation-sensitive default. (I thought it was obvious from the post that I understand how it works.)
.COM) create Shortcuts when dragged. Apparently MS does not consider BAT files to be executable. All other files (including .BAT and .DLL) are moved if on the same drive.
.EXE?
The problem with the using CTRL and/or SHIFT + Drag is that it takes two hands. Files are not heavy. I like that I can move them with one hand.
The qualification for when it creates a Shortcut is the same as everything else in MSWindows: what is the file extension? Executable files (.EXE and
Checked in Win98: Dragging SPOOL.EXE creates a Shortcut. Has that changed for WinXP, or is the spooler no longer a
My point was that the parent to my post suggested that Lotus Notes was not following the standard set by MS, and I was suggesting that MS had no standard.
---
The moderators are having FUN! My post above is currently:
+ 2 Insightful
+ 2 Informative
-3 Troll
For a total of:
+ 1 Troll
I guess some Slashdotters REALLY do not like Lotus Notes, or having it suggested that Notes follows the Unix ideas for files.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
1: Documents, MP3s, etc. all go under your home folder. This is for Linux and Windows as well. If you want something to be accessible by all users (e.g. MP3s), Windows provides a special virtual-user folder called "All users" which works nicely.
/home and /root).
2: Everything you care about goes under "My Documents" on Windows - the Desktop is temporary and is deleted regularly.
3: Folders under My Documents. I have "Text Documents", "Notes", "Photos", "Music", "Applications", "Programming", and "Other".
4: If I work on any project that takes more than one file, it gets it's own subfolder under one of the main category folders.
This way, I can find everything that I want very easily. And when it comes time to backup, I just copy the entire "Documents and Settings" tree (alanagous to
The most USEFUL directories you can create are three personal tmp directories, like so:
- tmp
- tmpSep
- tmp2003
When you do that, you instantly get rid of clutter: small files that you don't really care about, but want to keep for some finite amount of time.There are many more techniques. I'd like to write about them some time, but now is not that time.
Create new folder, call it 'Stuff" When it begins to get full and unweildly, create another folder and call it 'New Stuff' at this point you may want to call that older folder 'older stuff' ... you get the idea.
If you are feeling extra anal about your organization, create another folder and call it 'junk'. voila!
I tend to make heavy use of glimpse if I need to find something. In my experience a good search and index tool works much better than spending time categorizing (and then trying to remember how I categorized that bit of information.)
There is a significant body of knowledge around this subject that was developed by librarians. See this article for an introduction.
Another example: Jef Raskin's Canon Cat information appliance eschewed files completely. You located a document by typing words that are in it, in efect making the whole document its own filename.
The approach I find most powerful is set-oriented. I use an app called IMatch to manage my digital photos. Its sophisticated set-oriented category system makes it very easy to locate an image. That is what Microsoft is attempting with Longhorn's unified data store, or in more forward-looking projects like MyLifeBits.
The base directory describes the block.
Take for example software. There are two possible ways of sorting this: stuff from vendors and stuff by structure. I use both, but the majority of stuff gets stored in the vendor tree, and the minority under the opsys tree. So if i want a non-descript OS/2 utility for file management, i would look under opsys/os2/fileman/ while something from say file commander/2 [which i use a lot] is /vendor/fileman/harvard/os2/.
Personal stuff gets stored under the tdisk tree. These are grouped under broad catergories, eg 'maths', and then a date directory. eg: /tdisk/maths/nbfk/
The whole idea is if ye take a bucket-load of backup cdroms, ye should get a single tree that is easy to sort through.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Oh, you must be thinking about this or this.
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
I don't organize my data you insensitive clod!
LaunchBar for OS X has been a godsend for me in the absence of a decent metadata system. it lets you find any file by typing some letters out of its name, so you can open almost any file without taking your hands off the keyboard. it also learns from your abbreviations. If you name your files well it works great. Check it out at versiontracker.com - no affiliation, just a satisfied user who has tried way too many organisational tools that have sucked.
...by letting him/her organize mail in views as well as folders. An e-mail can be tied to different views, so in my way of organizing, a bush-joke would be assigned to both my humor- and my foreign policy views without ever leaving the inbox. Mail from mailing lists get their own folders named after the list, but can also be tied to a view if found relevant.
;)
The folders Opera uses are really just standard Unix mailbox files with an *.MBS extension, so the non proprietary mail users among us can easily combine, say, Pine and Opera - at least I do
--
SuperCoward
What, you don't have your own domain registered by now? I've got MY email everywhere, too btw...
I have implemented a data storage system that totally misses the concepts of a file and a directory. I'm simply calling everything I put into the system an "element". Instead of the traditional 1:N directory-file relationship, the system handles N:M relationships. In file system terms, each file can belong to any number of directories. The mechanism is quite similar to hard links in unices. The difference is that it is possible to "hard link" a "directory", too. Furthermore, a "directory", i.e. an element holding other elements, can contain data. Therefore, it is possible to store the html code of a web page in one element and the images it referers to into its child elements. There is no need to create a directory for the images, the web page can directly contain them. This is, in my mind, much more convenient. Furthermore, the system provides fine-grained access control with the aid of access control lists.
I have implemented the system with PHP on top of a MySQL database, and it is currently in use in a car part company that sells parts through the web. The database contains some 100000 parts, and is accessed frequently. This kind of system was needed because each part can be used with many car models. The situtation is quite analogous to your e-mail classification problem...
Finally, I have planned to launch an open source project to further develop and exploit the system. Any interest?
Post code: 20030902232202
Module code: 5AFT962
Abend code: 0c4
Actually, this does happen SOMETIMES.
If you hit delete on a message when in the "Sent" View, you get this message:
You are about to delete the selected document(s) from the Sent view. This action will delete the selected document(s) from all folders they belong to.
Would you like to continue deleting these documents or remove them from the Sent View instead?
[Delete] [Remove] [Cancel]
When I did support, the usual call was "I removed it from Sent and now it is not in my other Folder." Apparently Lotus/IBM noticed and fixed the View so that:
1. Documents can be marked not to show there.
2. This message appears.
A good developer would implement this anywhere there could be confusion. I am surprised that Lotus did not put a similar warning message on the "All Documents" View. A good LotusScript developer could program the mail so the warning appears whenever a document is about to be deleted, and (after testing) it could be implemented company-wide by the next day. The wonders of Open Source! Almost all Notes applications, including all the standard ones, come with the source visible and able to be modified.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
better !pout !cry
/etc/passwd > list
better watchout
lpr why
santa claus town
cat
ncheck list
ncheck list
cat list | grep naughty > nogiftlist
cat list | grep nice > giftlist
santa claus town
who | grep sleeping
who | grep awake
who | grep bad || good
for (goodness sake) {
be good
}
Another great thing about M2 is that is keeps track of threads -- very handy for mailing lists, but also for those long back-and-forth discussions. Also, the built-in Bayesian spam filter does a good job of making sure your e-mail doesn't get too clogged up.
I'm sure someone will say something about how Mozilla does many of these things, and it's true they have copied this from Opera, but I am at least glad that they copied from someone other than Microsoft. I guess as they say, "Imitation is the highest form of flattery."
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
I'm too lazy to use them anyhow. The fact that the search feature in Evolution is what I would call "the Google in my email" also encourages me to be lazy.
In the end, I have two or three folders for a broad pre-classification. Then I use the efficient wonderful (easy, fast) function in Evolution to look for what I need.
The more I try to strongly 'type' my data, the longer it takes to deal with it. Big general buckets work the best for me.
I don't always succeed at that, but I do try. Sometimes I don't produce the same neural network or mneumonic-map that I did two years ago for the same datum, and then it gets lost. So the more general, the better.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
you need help organising your inbox?????
either you are really dumb or you really have too much time on your hands dude.
this is a sign that slashdot is going down the drain when it accepts stuff like that.
jeez
It sounds very much like the concept of WFS in Longhorn. Virtual folders should be done easily with a SQL-based filesystem. However we still have to wait at least two years for Longhorn to arrive.
The idea is to "attach" qualifiers to data, so that the data doesn't have to be ordered in a hierarchical way. The data is looked for dynamically, as the system creates a tree structure on the fly, based on the qualifiers the user has attached to the data.
Example: A novel on the history of mathematics would by one user be stored in the folder "History" and another user would look for it in "Science". The ICMS solution lets the user attach "History", "Science" and "Novel" to the book, so that he himself (and other users) can find the book by looking in the folder "History" AND/OR "Novel" AND/OR "Science".
Neat eh?
(If you're interested in buying anything from them, contact me at mathieu.dhondt at quatris.be - I'll give you a discount).
"Those innocent fun games of the hallucination generation"
it would be trivial to extract names and addresses into a MySQL database and use it from there
Or you could use a real database and not the toy DB that your AOL-buddies use.
It's called Outreach Project Tool, you can download it from here. It uses LAMP.
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
The Lotus Notes client is a decent mail system. It can fetch mail from multiple domains. It will use Rules to move mail to Folders or delete it.
If you just accept all the defaults, the Domino server is easy to setup. Oh, wait, you do have to give it a name.
I helped some family members set up a few clients and a server. The only purpose of the server is so they can "replicate" their mail and address books from their desktops (at several residences) to the laptop for when they are travelling, which they do often. The server is on the laptop. They replicate just after they arrive, and just before they leave. The advantages:
1. They receive mail from several accounts, and it all goes into one Inbox.
2. They can organize their mail into Folders.
3. They can delete the mail.
4. They can add or delete addresses from their Address Book.
5. They do not have to worry about auto-run viruses. (And are smart enough not to open attachments without scanning.) Notes even lets them look at MSWord attachments in Preview mode.
6. All of their computers get updated each time they replicate. So all of their addresses are up-to-date. All of their mail is organized at each house the same way. They have the same Folders at each house. And they can delete a memo once and it will be deleted at the other houses. (Or they can realize they need it, and make a copy of it before Replication.)
I usually recommend Mozilla Mail for single-computer home users, but I do not know of another product that gives them these abilities. Anyone have suggestions?
---
As far as using Notes as a database program, IT IS THE EASIEST DATABASE PROGRAM YET.
About 90% of the professional Notes developers had no programming background before starting with Lotus Notes, and run away screaming if you try to explain relational databases to them. "What do you mean I cannot just add another field? I want it to appear on the screen right here. How do I know how long it should be? Some people have long last names." Yet they are building applications for the world's largest companies (DuPont, Ford, GM, most drug companies.)
---
I do wish IBM would market the stand-alone client better. It would help if more people would use it at home as well as at work. Anything that gets people away from MSOutlook is a good thing.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Have you tried Info Select? It handles e-mail and just about any other type of information, and the "killer" feature is that the whole thing is searchable and *fast*.
You organize things in an outline format (similar to nested folders), but the searching lets you find just about anything quickly using keywords.
The one criticism I have so far is that when I imported several GB of old e-mails, it slowed things down a fair amount. However, I suspect that if I stripped the attachments (or ideally converted them to file references instead of embedded files) it would handle it a lot better.
I organize my emails by putting everything in a single folder. No need to agonise over classification or get grumpy at myself for misfiling. Then I use ISYS to find whatever I need to find, using a plain english description of my need. Works a treat. ISYS is a swiss army knife search tool, but best of all, there's a stripped-down, email-only version coming out in a couple of weeks.
Not that anyone will read this 8^) but just in case..
I work for a company called Ditsu that makes a product that addresses these issues. EyeDotEm stores different types of Knowledge (explicit: [URLs, document links], implicit: [hints, ideas, descriptions], and tacit: [social networks, expertise finding]) as XML and allows you to relate it to other objects. Its like a non-hiererchical "database". The client runs on Windows (and is designed with ease of use in mind) the server runs on Windows and Linux, and it is commercial software but only uses Open Standards - there is no data "lock in".
The server API is also XML-RPC, so anyone with a little technical expertise can write scripts to automate any tasks the client can do.
It is meant as an "enterprise" product (ie. for groups).
At the risk of being flamed for making this an advert, I'm not going to link to our site.
If you're reading this and are interested, you're smart enough to google for it. If you'd like more information feel free to contact me via my e-mail or phone.
thanks for reading,
- Avi
Computer Scientist Donald Knuth solved this in an interesting way back in the 70's (!) He stopped using email.
Info Select (www.miclog.com) is a piece of lightweight PIM software that is effectively a collection of electronic post-it notes, easily searchable. Great for random information. Also good for *gradually* organising information, as it supports grids, DBs, etc. There are a few killer features I wish they'd implement (allow me to use my own editor, cache websites for searching, etc.) but it's worth the price for me.
It has email integration but I love The Bat (www.ritlabs.com ?) too much to hand my email over to some stinkin' PIM.
So far, I haven't found the need to organize my Inbox (using Outlook), although it has tons of emails. When I need to find something, I simple use the Find box and search for the person or topic that I'm looking for.
It has worked for me so far. I find it too much trouble to organize my email.
But if I were to organize my email, I would organize it by groups of people. For example, I would have "Friends", "Family", "Business" folders.
Hah, that's exactly right. I was even thinking about orthogonality as I wrote the previous post.
Now all I need is a 4 dimensional filing cabinet.
That is 3 different results from the same user action! So how do folders work everywhere else?
Well, IMO the real problem is not whether one maufacturer or another has his own user interface rules, it is the fact that folders and documents were introduced as the universal metaphor for arranging data on a computer in the first place.
And now we are stuck with the restrictions imposed by that representation, which will often lure first-time users into believing that just because it looks like real-life a folder it will behave like a real-life folder. No matter how you then try to squeeze the concept of links, views, etc, into some kind of association with this rather limited concept, you are likely run into problems. What, really would be the real-world counterpart of a symbolic link, a virtual forlder (!), a view, etc?
The file/folder metaphor comes from an age where files were few and far between for the average user. Maybe we need a completely new user interface concept to deal with today's overload of data.
This solution only works for email, but it's very nice once it's set up.
.txt with form feed separated emails.
I used a free app (the name eludes me) to export my PST folders to
Then I wrote a python script that could recognize the different plain-text formats of the various clients I have used (The Bat, Rebecca Mail, etc) and chew them all into one the same format (plaintext with FF separation), after which I wrote another script that put them all into a MySQL database with separate fields for headers, body and the most used fields like from, to and subject.
Then I set every email program I have to leave messages on the server, and instead I now have a script that takes all my email every 3 days and sticks it into my database.
Then I made a nice little interface for searching emails, and it is SO much nicer and faster than anything any email program has ever offered me in terms of searching, and I am free to switch email clients as much as I want to.
Give me liberty or give me kill -s 9
oxford_thames@on.aibn.com
For things that change/add very often I have one directory for each month. For instance things that I download I currently save first in /download/2003/09_sep
(possibly moving to somewhere else later).
In other cases where dividing into 12 months would be too detailed I divide into each quarter of the year, or for low frequent things I just put everything directly in the year directory.
For mail I have one physical file (personal folder file in outlook) for each year. I started with year as top level and then creating sub folders for different classifications of mail, but I realised that even a year is too long time to contain the same definition of classifications. I.e. "bug reports" today is not necessarily the same as you meant with "bug reports" one year ago. And even if you mean the exact same thing, the bug reports will possibly be for a different product or at least a different version.
So now I use year as top level and then Q1/Q2/Q3/Q4 as midlevel and then classify things further. This I am very satisfied with because I now only have about a dosen different subfolders that I use regularly - for the things that I currently are working with, nothing more, nothing less. Then each new quarter I start with blank sheets and recreate the subfolders I used to have only as needed. It gives me an initiative to rethink if the subfolder names are sensible and if they should be possibly splitted up or merged with other folders.
A bonus benefit for doing things this way is that cleaning up old stuff becomes really easy.
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
heard some talk about sql filesystems. organise your data anyway you want it whenever you need to. Needs much meta data adding or extracting for full usefulnes, and it sounds heavy that far down in an os but ........
How about adding an indirection, such as an outline editor or even network editor, and use URLs to the emails (which requires Webmail). In such as system, a category can be seen as a view (subset of URLs), and the same URL can be part of more than one view. For very heterogenous "networks" (such as contacts, emails, documents, projects, products etc) it might be useful to use a graph as the visual paradigm instead of a tree.
) which was developed to model a network infrastructure (with users, operating systems, networks, hardwarde components etc). This could also be used to manage personal information, such as emails, contacts and much more.
The ultimate solution would therefore be a diagram editor that allows to drag URL's and arrange these URLs in a network, adding additional properties to each object, showing their relations to other objects (URLs) _for a specific aspect_ as a network.
Other views can display other aspects of the data model. An example of such as system is GraphObjects Studio (http://jgraph.sourceforge.net/research/gostudio/
/dev/null
The invention of Post-It notes was quite funny - I got to know that on an industrial management course I took: 3M has had a policy of letting their employees spend a certain amount of time every week simply experimenting without a specific goal - and the result of one such experiment was "hmm, this glue doesn't stick very well and it doesn't dry - it's probably quite useless...or can we think of something?"...
Karma. Moderation. Is my
I keep all my messages in two big mbox files and use grepmail.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
You add categories to the information and then make use of views of the categories which look like folders, that way your information can be in several categories at the same time. e.g. It can be a vendor document and a technical manual.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Categories are a feature of MS Outlook; it probably exists in other clients as well (Evolution?), but my experience is with Outlook.
Outlook allows you to assign any number of categories to any object. An object can be an e-mail, task, contact, appointment, etc. Outlook comes with a list of "common sense" categories out of the box, but the user can make up categories as he/she sees fit.
If you keep all your messages in one folder and assign them to categories, you can use Outlook views to sort through the data however is most applicable at the time. One of the built-in views is "By Category". Items are grouped by category, then further sorted by whichever field you prefer within each category. If an item is in more than one category, it will be displayed multiple times in the list, inside the appropriate category grouping. It is better than folders, I assure you!
You can assign categories to objects multiple ways:
I find categories particularly useful for contacts and appointments, as they quite often fall into multiple categories. For example, a contact might be a family member, but also a member of my local LUG (Linux Users Group), and also works at a certain company where I have several business contacts. Folders simply won't do in this situation; I have no desire to maintain three seperate contact entires, but I want the contact to show in all three groups. But with categories, happiness ensues.
I recently switched to Namazu as a full-text search engine for my nmh e-mail. The combination seems to do pretty much what I want. Searches are reasonably fast and flexible, indexing is incremental, and I can script things massively.
I'd still like to get a machine-learning classifier going someday, perhaps by adapting the fine-looking dbacl, but my current combination seems like a good first cut.
At work I'm forced to use Lotus Notes 4.5.5 (yup, the 1995 version).
I do not like its interface, its menu structure and generally the way it works. (see the interface hall of shame for details on that)
However, it has some excellent search features built in (fast & reliable) and my only favorite option: the "All documents" folder, where all records are piled onto one big pile for me to search in. Really handy. So I can make folders and organise, but if I want I can just pretend there's only this one big folder.
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
When I was just graduating from college, and there were no aerospace engineering jobs to be had, I took a look at my biggest other skills (computers, typing), and decided that I had a pretty good shot a being a secretary, provided I got my filing skills in order. So I went to the library and learned about filing. The most useful form that they had was called "numeric filing".
That's what we use with our small business today. I suggest you learn it.
That said, I don't suggest that you learn it in order to be a secretary. At the time I took my test, I scored something like 55 words per minute, with a minimum of errors. Real secretaries that were taking the test were getting something like 20-25 wpm, 6-10 errors per minute. They also didn't understand all three major kinds of filing systems, but could use one filing system, sortof. So I figured I had it made. At the university where I had graduated, I applied for all the temp summer secretarial jobs around, figuring "I'll ride this dead period out, and then get an aerospace engineering job". No dice. I'm guessing that I didn't have the one job prerequisite that is *really* necessary, but each of the real secretaries did have, and which is not officially mentionable (specific physical attractiveness, to be generous). Suffice it to say, I wish jobs were handed out on merit, but most aren't.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I m working for a small Belgian company 'Link Software' that's producing a product called 'Link' (yeah I know, not very original).
The purpose of this software is to help organize information in almost exactly the categories listed at the end of kpellegr's question. The cool part is that you can link anything to anything, store data on those link fields, etcetera. The links generally symbolize relationships between records.
This lets you easily access all the contacts working for a company, meetings associated with a contact, documents associated with a meeting, and so on. Then you have your standard todo list, agenda, query & reporting tools etc.
So far it's only distributed in Belgium, France, and the UK through partners. If you're interested try going here, or check out an old flash demo of ours.
"Use cases are fairy tales..." I. S. 2005
I'm very spoiled. We use Lotus Notes at work for mail and applications. Notes has a construct called multivalue fields that can be used to create multiple categories (similar to folders) for grouping and sorting of data. I can file mail in as many categories as I like via use of categories. Simple idea that works great
... you then prepare a card catalog (or equivalent computer database), which cross-references the MD5 sums according to recipient/sender, date, and the various related topics.
Such a system is called a "numeric filing system", and is very useful for large corporations.
You don't have to sort according to MD5 hash, either. If you plan it correctly, you can create any regular sorting system you wish, including a tree-based sorting system. That is, some files are grouped according to date, because they are most useful that way. Those might be all your files for upcoming court dates. Others might be grouped according to purpose [everything IRS that is already archived], while others may be grouped according to the person with whom you deal [say, patient records. Maybe this is a doctor's office that deals with a large number of lawsuits.]
Of course, to do the multiple grouping, you're going to need a second level database, as well. That is, you first look up the topic, to get the MD5 hash. Then you go over to another card catalog, and look up the grouping for that document, and the location. Then you go and pull the document from the physical file.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Relevant metadata and objectrelational datamodels are common by now, I think soon we'll have entire filesystems working that way. The Filetree is very insufficient for data, thats very true. Hans Reiser has some nice essays on this. Allthough I don't use his FS he's got some very valid points on the subject.
I had the same problem for a website on all of what interests me and I tried to cope with it using a datamodel for the Zope Application Server (the current most sophisticated overall data tool imho). Yet some things I found very notable:
The weight of metadata is mostly based on personal opinion, preferences and data amount.
Take for instance 'Anime'.
Im an artist but also a geek. Now is anime the art dept. or more the geek dept.? If I look into the news it would probably be 'modern/pop culture', if I look into a book about film history it would be in the 'asian' chapter.
Or what about the windowmanager enlightenment? Is it 'computers / software / cool' or 'modern culture / avantgardistic / cyberpunk', after all I choose an own section for it based on that which makes E so distinct, its stylistic approach of the desktop. Or am I part of E devteam and therefore put it in 'computers / software / OS / Linux / programming'? If I have to differen't sections at the same level called 'OSes' and 'Programming' where does it go? A windowmanager is essential to an OS imho, and I only have one *nixbased OS that runs E. On the other hand it's one of my coding projects that work on E. So what now? You get the point.
What I do is outfit my data with as much metadata that is practical but organize the resulting data objects to my personal needs at the moment.
RPGs may be in my folder 'work', for a ruleset or RPG site I'm working on, but it could be that it moves to 'Documents' (at the same level) once I'm finished or other stuff pushes RPGs of my 'work' scedule. If I can't weight data in a certain way it's either currently the center of my life, so I leave it in a very central place or it's so unimportant that it goes into the 'things, objects and stuff' folder.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Dude, you better don't take holidays anymore.. you got issues...
I don't,. Its that simple!
It is often easier to find things on the whole Internet than on my own computer or in the local fileserver. Why not use the computers left over CPU-cycles during the night to index everything during noghts and coffe breaks. I would need something like Google on my computer and on our fileserver.
I believe the fundamental point here isn't about how to make trees work with symlinks, virtual folders etc. but finding a better paradigm for information storage.
We are accumulating more and more data on our hard drives - documents, music, photos, films etc. - and as we do so trees become less and less effective as a means to organise the data. Many of us probably have seperate photos and movies folders but suppose, for example, you've been on holiday and have a lot of photos and also a few movies you recorded while you were there. If you split these into the movies and photos folders then suddenly you break the connection between the files. If you create a holiday media folder then you can no longer rely on the photos folder to contain all your photos.
I've come across a couple of solutions to the problem. The first is what could be described as an attribute-based filing system, newdocms : files are assigned many attributes which can then be used to search and cluster the files. Unfortunately, the project seemed to die a sudden death at the end of January. Second, is Microsoft's research MyLifeBits project which has a similar concept but adds annotation and hyper-linking.
My personal view is that the answer lies somewhere in fuzzy sets but I haven't quite finished thinking things through yet...
I personally use ls -Flatrck
.files
;P
F = show file type with final character
l = long directory format (detailed)
a = even the
t = sort by time
r = reverse the order
c = by change date
k = block size of 1k... not really useful, but helps me remember the alias to make on a new system.
On FreeBSD, before BSD died(*) I would use ls -Flatrock but the 'o' has a different meaning with the GNU ls (omit group column in long output) than the BSD ls (include the file flags in the long output).
(*) Before the -1 Flamebait, I mean 'Died on my system'. I decided to install RedHat instead though, because as everyone knows: BSD is dying.
First fire up a gnome-terminal, then type pine, then press O then I press R then I press F then ?
A good analyzis can be found in the White Paper by Hans Reiser.
Evolution has this virtual folder concept, which allows you to set up filters that will decide in which folders mail appear - allowing one mail to apper in multiple folders (but still only having one copy of the mail).
:)
Furthermore when you update the filters, your virtual folders are (of course, by means of the way that it is implemented) updated.
I used it for a while and it worked great. Until I started having more mail, then it started getting slow. Then it got really slow. I quit evolution entirely when it was unable to show any of the mails in my inbox, using virtual folders or not.
In short, the feature is in evolution, but if you have a lot of mail lying around (an inbox with 20-30k e-mails), it just doesn't work. Evolution has some nice features, they're just not implemented in a way so that they work on anything but toy mailboxes. Which is really a pity, since the ideas were great.
Now, I'm on bogofilter+procmail+kmail, and I'm fairly happy with that. No virtual folders, but I can read my mail again. Yippie!
Clearly, the tree-structure is now antiquated. It's obvious that an item should be able to exist in several different folders, and with symlinks this is possible. It's just such a pain to do that I never bother.
I organise everything by time. For my emails, I have a new folder for each month, and then have sub-folders in each month for each topic. I can use "search" if I can't remember which month something is in. Each month I have a general "plonker" folder called "email" for almost all send and received.
For my files, I organise into sub-directories year/month/topic. I currently have ten years organised like this. For the purposes of backup, I keep a snapshot each month, before copying on to the next month. Unused stuff stays in the previous month's folder, and doesn't clutter my current work folder.
That makes it easy to back up. This is the first system I have been truly happy with, and is the least effort.
Storing Data:
Text: Have a 'useful' file for storing anything useful, it ended up largely full of quotes and sigs but is still searchable and 'useful'.
Email: Highlight email sent to me or my work group. Keep it all, acting on the emails requiring action immediately, and copy the best bits into a pending folder or personal which is periodically reviewed and put into 'silver' 'gold' or 'platnum' folders, so at least I review interesting email twice.
Bookmarks: Bookmark everything interesting and then periodicaly review it and put it into 'junk' or 'silver' bookmark folders, keep all bookmarks, do not read many, brose the 'silver' links if bored.
emacs wiki: used to store logs of work in progress and seperate entries prer project for old work progressed.
At least I get to make a decision or two about all the information comming in, there must be a better way though.
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
I work for a company which has developed a document management system where all objects (or documents) can be stored and secured acording to x ammount of meta types or over-ridden to specific users. Users are then able to edit or read the files based on permissions.
The whole system works via a web-based front end which means that it is multi-platform.
The data can then be organised and viewed in a number of ways which is all highly configurable.
Probably useless but its my two cents. (euro cents of course!)
I save all my email, have done so for over 10 years. To actually find anything I just make it searchable. Works like a charm,
Cor
Care to place a wager? Plenty of companies (take Sun for example), are surviving on less (and with less prospects) than Microsoft at the moment.
I think you've got your logic the wrong way around anyway. It probably should be "MS will wither without Windows". However, even if Microsoft were to have its market share eroded more by competition, they're hardly going to "die". I use GNU/linux at home, because it fulfills my functional requirements (with gcc, emacs, xmms and mozilla), but the state of the linux desktop leaves a lot to be desired - in terms of ugliness, klunkiness (yes, even with the interactivity patch and O(1) scheduler), useability (take the gnome control centre for example), and compatibility (although this is improving in some regards). Gaim still blows. Some of this arises from the current stagnant state of XFree86.
I can't really recommend linux to my family and friends, I know it's just going to cause them pain. It might be suitable for your typical "type-it-up and email it to me" secretary, but not when you want to use commercial services that tend to have Windows only clients (a lot of economic software), and recommending TeX to someone who has written 250 pages of their thesis in Word, albeit structured using styles, isn't really helpful.
Mac OS X seems to be doing a lot better than linux in terms of desktop software, especially considering how new the (Aqua) API is. A new Powerbook is certainly enticing, but the price tag is the limiting factor.
-- Why is it that every article on /. so easily descends into M$-bashing/defending? I even managed to include some X bashing and Apple evangelism!
So, everybody is bitching about making a bigger cartridge than a bic lighter, and man I love to see all the engineers begin to pop up. Did anybody else stop to think that there's going to be a lot of overhead changing the powersource, and I don't know if you've noticed but a laptop doesn't exactly have a lot of room to work with, except, of course, where the battery currently sits. Perhaps a bic lighter is all the more "left over" room there was. Let's not play engineer when we don't know what we're talking about (and I'm simply proposing my thoughts, not saying this is "how it is").
Thank you, please drive through.
Hi,
the problem you describe is really terrible - with the folder structure you always have to decide on the order of folders. What I want are not exactly folders but keywords, and then you can search by keyword.
Actually, there is a tool available at
http://www.mail-sleuth.comwhich does this. You can assign keywords which then appear as folders. But if you give for example the keywords "Slashdot" and "interesting" you'll find the "Slashdot" folder as subfolder in the "interesting" folder and vice-versa. Also it comes with a nice graphical representation.
Unfortunately, it's currently only available as MS Outlook-plugin, but they plan to develop also a plugin for Mozilla (at least I was told so at the conference I saw the presentation of the tool). If you want other things, just bug them - the e-mail address is on the website.
Cheers,
JoMy problem is similar - I backed up 4Gb of 'loosely organized' data last night, and my bookmark.html is over 1Mb. I have been looking for a way to organize this for a while. The files are things like pictures, reference materials, sofware - all the usual sort of stuff you download from the net. I started using a Dewey Decimal system to sort it out but this breaks quickly as too much goes into 006 and it get's arbitrary very quickly. I still use windows as well as linux (not just for games), I have 2 questions:
1: I used to have AltaVista Discovery as a 'local' search engine, is there any current software that does this? (Win and linux)
2: Netscape has/had a feature in bookmark manager to test the bookmarks to see if they are still live. Is there anything that does this, apart from an old copy of Navigator? This could be either platform as I intend to rsync the bookmarks to a server. Ideally I'd merger rather than replace but...
i bet half of you people are paid to be sys admins and yet don't know link d or how to use alt sreams or any othaer advanced ntfs feature - both of those being quite useful for data organisation, and the indexing service can be useful if one just takes the time to poke around with it
I use Evolutions, which has a nifty feature called vFolders (Virtual Folders).
With this feature I can store everything in a single place, and have the virtual folders pointing to the original data.
For instance, I have a "FORM:" vFolder, where all the web forms are shown. I also have the "FORM: XXX", "FORM YYY" and "FORM: ZZZ" vFolders, where the product-specific web forms are shown. And I have the "XXX", "YYY" and "ZZZ" vFolders, where any messages related to these products are shown.
And things got even more interesting, as I have configured specific vFolders to display messages from certain people, mailing lists, etc.
Download Evolutions and see with your own eyes!
The Good, Easy system worked for me back when I used it. The premise is to get everything into plain text, and use simple tools to manage it. There's a Wired article on it, and the source documents to the Good, Easy Desktop and Good, Easy email are at Winterspeak.
(OK, so I'm being flippant, but it's true!)
The more advanced the technology, the more open it is to primitive attack
First and foremost, leave everything in your inbox.
"But the point of this excercise is to _organize_ my ifnormation!"
Well, yes. Which brings me two the second mechanism(s): use Evolution's v-folders. I really wish that more clients supported v-folders, because they the ideal metaphor for e-mail soft links. So, now you're stuff's "organized" in one folder, and many sub-folders. Why is the "one folder" bit important? Because -- and here's the nifty part -- you can now grep/Perl/regex the hell out of it with a fair bit of facility.
$.02
yes I set up my qmail with squirrelmail and I can get my email anyplace. And I never have to change it because i have control over the server.
The key thing to recognise here is that although the individual data items (emails in this case) are important what is more important is the relationships between them.
Just like the Internet an individual page has some value but its value is greatly enhanced by the quality of the links as much as the quality of the content. So how could this apply to personal data.
Take for example a message about a product from a supplier. I would want to link this to other similar products from their competitors, projects or client who could use this product. Experts in this field who could give advice on this etc.
We already have some of these links in place with discussion threads, but contact links are usally restricted to the sender and other reciepiants.
I have been thinking about how to organise contact information along these lines to alow linkages between contacts. Along the lines of the studies of "Six Degrees of separation" witch says that we are all connected via social networks and nobody is more than six contacts away from anybody else.
So if there was a VCARD that incorporated connections individuals and groups could combine their contacts together. This would be very useful, say I wanted to find out about a company, I could search through my contacts, and then through their contacts for someone who worked there.
I simply use M2, the built in mail client in opera, it has a sort of a symbolic link kind of thingy, where each mail can belong to various groups at once. Took a little while to get used to it, but REALLY rocks.
i had a similar problem a while back and i started beating on it with postgresql and perl. it's actually getting to a nice polished state. currently it's webbased, but i think my roommate wrote something for the console also.
/mnt/fsroot/set1/a/2/3/a23f55abab...
here's the skinny. i store files in a tree based on their checksum. so the file with the checksum a23f55abab... would be stored like this:
then i store pointers to this file in a database along with different metadata (mimetype, original file name, keywords, mount point (set1), etc). then i define lists based on queries to the database.
so i could have a list like:
images::vacation::italy 2001
the images would have keywords like
italy, vacation, 2001
and the query defining that list would look something like:
keywords:vacation and
keywords:italy and
keywords:2001 and
mime_type:image
i need to commit this stuff to the CVS, but it seems to work.
-- john
I simply follow StrongBad's lead - Deleted!
I use diarist.com installed on my computer.
Anything that interests me is stored in organized and categorized blogs. Including, emails, files, articles and texts.
If anyone is interested in using this contact me at mpamphile[remove.this]@hotmail.com.
Free Web based FTP
I agree with Slartibartfast. The main points are to 1) add metadata and 2) improve search capability. I haven't read all posted comments (apologies for any redundancy) but in MSOutlook, one can add "categories" and then mail can be sorted accordingly. I'm not aware of a limit on the number of categories, but they can be added easily and on-the-fly. Also, the search feature is OK, though a little clumsy and it can't search over multiple mail archives. Bottom Line: leave mail in one folder, add categories, search/sort.
Tag your emails with all relevant properties. The physical folder is less relevant than the virtual folders you query via the properties.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Here's what I do:
For email: I treat my INBOX like a to-do list. When the task is done or otherwise irrelevant, I delete the message. At work, Mail.app handles my spam; I use Pine at home, and have to hit the 'd' key myself. Both programs save sent mail automatically; though, I rarely refer to it.
For files: I use my home directory on unix-like systems, and my desktop on OS X and Windows. These are intended to be work areas, and I use them as such. When files become irrelevant, I delete them.
Complicated sorting systems are unnecessary for most of us. Ask yourself, "how often do I look at these archives? do archived files and email pose a security / privacy threat?". The answers are probably "almost never" and "yes".
Some files (and email) need to be saved for business' sake (i.e. source code, documentation, requirements, proposals, support requests, whatever...). That sort of storage should be the responsibility of your project management tools, not individual users.
I had this problem when trying to organize my 7000+ digital photos. I tried a new Adobe product, Photoshop Album, and my soul turned black... no seriously, they had a tag system where you create groups and tags within these groups. The tags can then be assigned to any number of photos and a photo can have any number of tags. So the pictures from my little brother's birthday would have a People/Brother tag, an Event/Birthday tag, a Place/Mom's House tag, and any other tags that seem appropriate. It works amazingly well barring the fact that tag groups cannot be nested more than 2 levels deep. But that's a software limitation, the idea remains valid. Unfortunately there is nothing like this for email that I'm aware of. Regardless, any forward-looking organization system needs to have a many-to-many relationship between the organization structures and the data. The standard folder tree representation is obviously too limited.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
"Search" does my organizing for me.
..you insensitive clod!!!
Outlook has the virtual folder idea where it will look and find emails defined by criteria (new messages, flagged for followup etc) and while this is great I still have several real folders that I sort my mail into. The reason? Well if I ever decide to change email software, I can almost be 100% sure these virtual folders won't translate to the new software and I'd have to set up everything again... and When you recieve large ammounts of email thats not an easy thing to do.
..
I think a combined system works best, archive your email in real folders, look at it day to day in virtual folders.
--------- If its possible it will happen, If its impossible it will just take longer
The OCLC already has a solution for organizing large amounts of information. Remember the Dewey Decimal System/Classification(http://www.oclc.org/dewey/)? I use it all the time and have a convenient card catalogue of all my records taking up most of my desk :) And people were saying the DDC was dead...
I am much better at remembering what month something happened than classifying the email. There is no doubt as to when I got the email, but there will always be a doubt as to who sent it, what it dealt with, etc.
I keep 2 months in the Inbox. If I don't need something, it gets deleted right away. It is rare that I have to go back into my archive to find something. I can always search my archive as well.
At home, I use pine. I have incoming messages going to folders for cron, DMCA (mailing list), merch (for merchandise related stuff) and that's it. If I don't need it, I delete it. If my inbox gets really big, I clean it up. If I need to, I can always go to ~/mail and grep for what I need.
I think the more complicated your mail system is, the more, well, complicated it is.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
In Opera, the built-in mail client called M2 keeps all of the messages as a single, flat XML database. Then, in lieu of "folders" and the mess they create, there are "access points" which are equivalent to SQL (or other database) "views". Check it out: http://www.opera.com/products/user/m2/ Also, Outlook 2003 has this functionality.
samrolken
File to /dev/null.
Just remember to cat /dev/le0 once in a while to keep the bit bucket from getting full. It helps to uncap your ethernet terminator while you do this.
http://m-arriaga.net/software/newdocms/
I think that there is an even better way for doing this: Zoe! I think it is ideal for what you are doing and I found it to be surprisingly "intelligent".
I generally advise my clients to get rid of as much information as possible. In other words, use the Trash folder - frequently and with extreme prejudice.
The vast majority of the notes and files that you save will never be viewed again. Not only that, but if you do go searching for files or messages, you also run the risk of getting the wrong version of the file or finding the penultimate message rather than the final answer.
Since my clients are government agencies, they also are subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and other disclosures arising from lawsuits. By reducing the amount of dreck in their files and archives, they have less to sort through and to produce when one of these requests comes in.
This was a revelation to one client who complained about how much time they spent answering FOIA requests. I recommended that they purge their falls of all but the key documents. It took a lot of effort to overcome the compulsion to save every letter and each draft of every document, but when they got aggressive about it, they could see real benefits. Suddenly they had loads of space in their filing cabinets and they actually enjoyed answering FOIA requests with "Sorry, we do not have any documents that match your request."
Just don't ask me how many messages I have in *my* Inbox.
Easiest way for most people is Categories in Outlook. You add category values to a contact or meeting, then change your view of the data to be category-centric. You then get the familiar [+] next to each category title, and contacts are available in any category they are a member of. Not multiple copies of the contacts...
I don't do this for email (I use folders), but for contacts and meetings, its great. Gives you a very fast, concise view of project progress (via meeting information), and lets you easily find contacts regardless of the context in which you think of them. Ie a particular client, project, friend - could be all three, and despite whatever mental path you take to get to them (as friend, project or client), you can get their info easily.
I think that to really find an order in your data, you need to be able to sort it without a PC. For example, think about your data as items of different size, and about your computer as a room. How would you divide your data? How would you store it? How would you sort and search it? By size? By type? By sender?
Once you figured that out, PC-sorting will be
smooth.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
The outlook journal feature might help with this... good way to keep track of when you receive emails/info related to certain contacts.
Create multiple journals, instead of folders, and drag emails into any relevant journals. With a little work, you can even setup public journals that multiple people in your workgroup could view and contribute too.
Unfortuntely, Journal seems to make copies of emails, not links to em - the IT guys at my job HATE it cause it wastes so much server space (so they say). But, it's very useful for keeping track of phone calls to certain contacts, etc.
If you don't want humor at the top when you read the article comments, just go to your /. preferences and click on the 'Comments' tab. There you can set 'Reason Modifiers' for each moderation reason. Click on the dropdown for 'Funny' and change it to -1, -2 or whatever. Change 'Insightful' or 'Informative' to +1 if that is what you are looking for. Now scroll to the bottom and click Save.
This post was brought to you by 'Know Your Slashdot'; a service of Jack Of All Trades, conveniently located on the corner of Renaissance and Singularity. "We know Jack!"
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
You have hit on a key problem that I have.
/home/lodragan/perl/examples/snippets/widgets/pars ing/ directory with the filename widet283745parser.pl (as opposed to widget83475parser.pl). We don't have to remember that our best picture of Grandma is located in \Windows\Desktop\My Pictures\Grandma\ under the filename 082103023984.jpg.
Both at work and at home, I collect innumerable amounts of data that I end up needing at a later date.
The main problem is that the search capabilities inherent in basic file systems are not suitable for searching for binary type files. Similarly, the plethora of text files and the lack of suitable names in large populations of these files often precludes quickly finding what you need, and brute force greps over many files, while workable, is still time consuming when many of these files have similar words or phrases in them.
What we need is a meta layer of abstraction where we can put objects in multiple classes, as well as provide our own verbage about what that object means to us (which is unique from person to person). All of this meta data would be searchable - so you wouldn't have to remember where something was, just what it means to you.
This way, we don't have to remember, 14 months later, that we put the snippet about building a wiget parser in perl in the
Who really wants (or can for that matter) keep tens of thousands of these abstract relationships in their heads? I can't; I fail at it miserably every day. Searches that should be instantaneous can take hours for particularly abstract information - all of that time wasted on searching.
I am working on a web based client/server application in Zope to address this issue. Some folks have suggested some windows applications already exist for doing this; but, I have not seen anything that would work on a large scale or software like this for GNU/Linux systems. I decided to go with a client/server model for several reasons:
1. Data backup and restoration is centralized - instead of spread across multiple workstations.
2. Sharing information between my family members is more easily accomplished; I intend on building 'public/private' sections so that a user can get the full benefit of the classification and search capabilities without compromizing privacy. Public areas would be available for searching by everyone.
3. Community building is enhanced. I dig the idea of virtual communities, and think this can serve as a central point for building such communities. One of the limitations I see in MUDs and some of the VR game worlds is the lack of a rich collection of tools for putting your mark on the world. There is no way to record and make available information, stories etc, in the game world other than 'word of mouth'. This seems like a particularly strange limitation, having to leave the game world (get out of character outside of the VR) in order to share information or record stories more permanently, given that lore and learning are a prime motivation (or should be) behind many of the role playing that goes into these games. Why not have the ability to build a library in your MUD? This tool could serve as the basis for that - with the right hooks built-in.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Looks nice. IMAP is a highly desirable feature. But they need to lose those taglines. Sure it's a free account, I woudn't mind if the spam me, but if they start attaching spam to all of my email, that's just wrong, and I'm not gonna be the douche with the stupid sig.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
in windows, i make a usr folder and then use subfolders based on what it is. apps, docs, libs, drivers, images.... so i guess i use the *nix style.
/home/me
i do the same for linux, just under the
http://www.3m.com/us/office/postit/learn_history.j html
To foster creativity, 3M encourages technical staff members to spend up to 15 percent of their time on projects of their own choosing. Also known as the "bootlegging" policy, the 15 percent rule has been the catalyst for some of 3M's most famous products, such as Scotch Tape and -- of course -- Post-it(R) Notes.
In 1968, Spencer Silver was a man on a mission. Working in 3M's Corporate Research Laboratory, it was his job to analyze adhesives and how 3M could use them in new products. Along the way, he discovered a unique adhesive that formed clear, sparkly spheres instead of a film. He spent the next few years shopping his new glue around 3M before Art Fry found a use for it.
Art Fry's the guy who put Silver's adhesive on a scrap of paper to form a better bookmark. He was a new product development engineer for 3M at the time, but it was while singing in the church choir that he received the inspiration for Post-it(R) Notes.
It was 1974 when Art Fry entered Bob Molenda's office with a nifty little note in hand -- and a lot of plans. As Fry's supervisor and the special projects lab coordinator, Molenda helped Fry get his pet project through the pilot test period. Molenda was most recently the sales and marketing manager for Post-it(R) Custom Printed Notes before retiring from 3M after 33 years.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Its rather low on my priority list so things are going slowly, I'm afraid.
The story poster would probably be interested in the now-famous (if divisive) Epiphany bookmarks system. It's not limited to bookmarks.
Basically, you assign keywords to files or folders. E.g. If a folder's contents happens to be both pr0n and home video footage, you can assign it two distinct keywords. Then when you go looking for it a week later, you apply filters on your entire collection of files by selecting keywords. You'll find it by selecting either pr0n or home_videos, or an intersection of the two if you need to narrow the filter results.
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
a lot of financial services companies blacklist webmail and accessing such a page is a violation of their acceptable usage policy, with penalties potentially including termination.
a lot of viruses are introduced into otherwise secure systems b/c a user opens an e-mail he or she shouldn't. in one such organization where i worked, the network was exposed either to nimda or code red through precisely such activity. the offending individual was, i believe, terminated.
ed
One folder to share them all, one folder to find them.
you seem to be suggesting that we "metatag" documents/files. this is actually a great idea, if you think about it.
unfortunately, the problems associated w/ creating such a system effectively and then diligently assigning the appropriate values to each and every document/file becomes prohibitive.
f'rex: let's take the example of pr0n. you could metatag based on area(s) of interest: e.g., b&d, lesbian, groups, etc. assigning the proper values would allow you to search for the ahem desired file.
however, if you want to implement such a system on an existing datastore, you've got a pretty daunting task ahead of you.
theoretically, something in the OS or search tool you're using could offer the option to assign the appropriate tags.
but then you run into some problems: what if something isn't [x] enough to be [x], but contains those elements? is minor [x] enough to get classified that way? do you need an integer value or something to describe just how [x] something is?
and this would hardly be universal: one person's art is another person's pr0n.
ed
c'mon, the parent deserves to be modded +1 funny...
ed
I create a new folder for each item. Then enough new parent folders to build a conceptual chain back to the primal item, or some other item in the extant tree. This would be useful except that my conceptual links tend to be one-way references, so the storage, while consistent, is write only.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It's a pain in the ass to use, sometimes, and the UI makes a lot of my friends want to puke, but I'm working on it... And hey, I haven't lost a piece of email in years. All 12 thousand or so, stored on a nice big database. Of course, whenever someone says, "Hey, check your email" and I have to say, "Well, uh, I have to wait 5 minutes, cuz I don't have a 'check now' button..." I get a lot of exasperated sighs from people. But oh well.
I'm pretty shocked that no one in this entire discussion so far has done what I do. Now, I don't expect normal people to use a system like mine, because it require thinking like a coder. But this is slashdot!
I use the constellation of nmh (which stores every msg as an independent file, and allows nested folders and permits sim-linked folders and messages), procmail (which happily filters directly into nmh-style folders if you want it to), and my own domain name, with catch-all email.
I simply write a procmail rule to snag emails and park them where I want them, on reasonable conceptual bases. This is greatly facilitated by using different email addresses for different purposes. For instance, using the Andrew-style plus convention (MyBusinessUsername+company.com@myDomainname.com) to sort vendors. I sign up for email lists that way, and then use procmail on the "Received" headers instead of the TO headers. Works like a charm.
When I have a particularly active project, I make a higher-level symlink folder for it. So for instance, when I had a folder $myMusicAccout/$bandName/gigs/$gigname/playlist, I would make an alias $gigname at the top level while that gig was being planned, then blow it away after the gig.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
That's exactly the feature I've always wanted... the ability to put a message into multiple folders without actually putting into multiple folders.
All messages are stored in a single database/spot... each message can be linked to muliple "views" (folders). A "folder" is nothing more then a filter that only shows messages that are specifically linked to that view.
So when I receive a schematic that requires review from Joe Smith at ABC Company, I can link it to three views: Emails from Joe Smith, Schematic Reviews and Emails from ABC Company.
I think Lotus Notes did something simliar but not quite...
Hmm, when I try clicking on it I get this place of work's ACCESS DENIED banner page.
I guess you can't access it *anywhere*
8-PP
...too bad it's a Windows-only product at the moment and only supports pop3 & Exchange mailboxes. I use it at work and it saves me from having to file e-mail hierarchically. I have two folders, Inbox & Read. IF I need to find something, a quick Scopeware Vision query does the trick.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I have recently started looking into a product that looks promising called sqldesktop http://www.sqldesktop.com/ It uses a database to organize data and make it available to disparate desktops. I like the idea of being able to access my data from linux or windows. Has anyone else had any experience with this product? I have only had this product for 2 days so I'm sorry I don't know a great deal about it.
Telecommuting! What about socialization?
When saving/creating a file, I've put myself in the habit of using as many keywords in the filename as are relevant to the file. So for example, when I save a chat session that a friend and I had I name the file along the lines of:d inner .txt
chat_w_friendname_re_cars_boating_SCO_sucks_
Then, a simple "locate" command just helps me find the files I need.
In this way, I don't have to worry about where I put the files necessarily; just that I use a consistent keywording system.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
BoilerBase supports sets of categorized messages, allowing one message to have any number of categories, each category to have unlimited numbers of messages, categories to overlap and contain any number of categories, and any number of user-defined, automatically-applied categories. The folder paradigm does not come into play. Rather each message is subjected to each inquiry as it is added to the index file -- which for me currently has 50,000 messages -- and is categorized appropriately. When you want to view messages, choose any standard category, such as Date, To, From, or Subject, or choose one of the user-defined categories and view the messages in that category without further computation. Plus, any time you want, you can use the many categorize functions to create even more categories, or merge and/or split out the auto-applied ones. You can even view -- without further computation -- all the messages that have any given word, categorize those, and then run powerful search operations to cull out a particular subset. These are only a few of the kinds of set operations you can perform, without having to use any complex syntax. BoilerBase is not a replacement for your mailer; rather it works in background, taking over all the annoying, tedious, and risky aspects of keeping, maintaining, and indexing your email so that you can always find what you need, easily accomplish backup and restore operations, and maintain a historical record of all email -- that isn't private -- for one or many. The auto download, auto feed, unwrapping and other functions enable consolidation and/or splitting out of messages to suit the needs of individuals, workgroups or larger geographically dispersed communities. Check out version 2 at Boilerbase.com.
I'm evaluating Zoot for broadly similar reasons.
Zoot Software
From their Web site:
"Information can originate from many sources, e-mail, the Web, CD-ROM, to name a few. This information must be reviewed and labeled in order to make it readily available for future reference. Zoot lets you quickly collect, review and label information while working directly with the information source, whether it's a Web browser, E-mail client, Word Processor or any other Windows application."
So far, so good, but I can't help escaping the feeling that the product has been neglected for some years prior to the recent release. The UI takes some getting used to, but most of that is unlearning the idioms of Windows files and folders.
Take a look at
ZOE. It does all this and more.
I get many emails, so I had to find a way to save emails without filling up my Inbox. An Archives sub-folder (from Inbox) for recent mail works nicely. Once an email is no longer needed then I move it to one of the following folders:
/personal
/business
This is email from friends or personal contacts go. If I'm in constant contact with someone then I'll create a sub-folder for him/her and archive mails here (such as Bill, Frank, Jane), otherwise I simply archive emails in Personal.
This is for other non-personal emails. It varies on so many things but the main thing I try to do in this folder is create broad, generic words like "Flash" (since I do Macromedia Flash development), "Movies" (you've got to have a Lord of the Rings folder and Apple's Trailers folder), "Games" (for Gamespy newsletters and the like). And for legit mailing lists, I have a "Spam" folder (for TriggerStreet, J-Crew, Buy.com, and so on)
I also use POPfile, which does a nice job of filtering out illegitimate Spam.
grep >= ! == $your
http://www.thebrain.com
It creates a tree of information where everything is linked. It's a bit pricey, but SO awesome for organizing information. Use it like a File Manager, it can launch websites or files. It's got a patented interface I believe. I'm lucky enough to have an old version that doesn't expire. The new versions look nicer, but I'll stick with free over functional almost every time. What I have works for me. It lets your organize your files the way you think, regardless of where they are stored.
It turns itself into an always on-top icon when you mouse away from it. It "sticks" to the side of your windows and slides back out when you click on that icon again.
Check out their website. The interface at the top is like a small version of their application.
Files I receive which need to do something about (like copy, archive, edit...), well things like that I put into a folder whichs name starts with an "!". That way, the folders is in the top of the directory listing. After I reach "!!!!", I continue with "!5" etc until I finally get tired and move "!*" into "!new". This continues until I *definetely* get tired and either burn the complete folder to a CD and delete it on my hard disk... or I do the latter without the CD-burning part...
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
If you don't use a PDA you're really killing yourself. I started with a PSION ORGANIZOR back in the '80s, went to a Apple Newton Messagepad (using the keyboard) and now use a Pocket PC made by Toshiba.
The thing all 3 have in common is that they use a common data file format for all data, allowing you to use the "find" command to search all of your emails, addresses, appointments, notes, etc. at the same time.
In addition, except for the NEWTON, they fit just fine in your pocket.
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
I use a relational database.
perl -e '$_="\007/4`\cp%2,".chr(127);s/./"\"\\c$&\""/gees
In M2 (Opera) you can have an email in multiple 'views' while it is still just 1 email in the physical view. But that way you can add the email in multiple folders without wondering if you are looking at the correct email
80 CC D8 AF AE D3 AB 54 B7 2E CE 67 C7
When you get a mail that happens to go in a category the rules wouldn't normally put it in, because of what it mentions in passing for example, what do you do? Add something contrived to the rules? The fault I find with most virtual folder systems is they are purely views of database queries.
What needs to happen is that the rules set one or more categories for the message, and then where you have virtual folders or database views today, you instead have simpler queries of what is in each category, with an easy way to turn a given category on or off when viewing a message. In short, you need to be able to correct categories for a given message without editing the rules.
The folder/directory paradigm is easy to learn because it's based on a familiar set of actions and relationships from the old fashioned physical world of file organization, but I'm pretty sure it's not the most efficient possibility.
I would prefer to just identify one or more classifications for an item and have that item appear in a dynamically generated heirarchy of classifications (a classification is an item but an item is not necessarily a classification).
I'm sure there's a better way to describe this but the post luncheon fog has rolled in...
Fuck yahoo, (and any other webbased mailservice for that matter.) Why not give mailreader a whirl, just type in your username, password, and incoming-mailserver and it'll fetch it for you.
Go to Fastmail.fm and check it out
Don't bother. Their servers are located in the US, which means that the US Government gets to read all your mail (or scan it for keywords) whenever it wants.
With extreme prejudice, depending upon the source.
Seriously, so many people hand me printed crap, that I have had to institute a strict screening process. Unless it is of immediate relevancy, and unless it is not stored on some shared drive, it gets to play in the garbage.
I ended up using a multi-pronged approach:
1. Make (or allow braindead software to make) dozens of copies of everything: a permanent copy of every message that has ever seen the inbox, plus copies in project directories, version-control systems, installed on machines, etc. Minimum one backup copy of all of that.
2. Work out how to store it all efficiently (i.e. let the filesystem find duplication and replace it with references--even better, scan for the duplication while writing and never have it in the first place). So 'cp foo bar' should operate in O(1) time, and be identical to 'ln foo bar' except with copy-on-write semantics. Use caching where appropriate for performance or compatibility.
3. Work out how to search it all efficiently, e.g. with SQL queries, regexps, grep, Google, whatever's appropriate. The data from #2 is nice here...how many times have I asked "are there other copies of this file lying around somewhere?" or "where did this file come from?"
-- I avoid spam by accepting only OpenPGP encrypted or signed email at this address. Clear-signed, RFC2015, heck, even
Hey, you get what you pay for. You expect them to give you a free account for NOTHING in return?
I'm a paid FM user and quite happy with it. Never had an easier time managing my e-mail.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Maybe someone could make use of NTFS Alternate Data Streams in some cool way:
http://www.heysoft.de/nt/ntfs-ads.htm
(I must try that out some day, maybe I can make emacs interface those streams for me.)
So, for email, I keep folders to a minimum of about 6. But because time is so important, I tier those, so that anything older than a week goes into a mirror folder structure under OLD. Then anything older than a month is moved into ARCHIVE. And the archive stuff is compressed, so I have to really want to look at it.
Loose information is another problem, with a simple index-card like solution. A lot of the information we need is small, like "joe's phone number", and doesn't warrant a whole file. For that I actually throw all the information into a single big file, where each datum is one line (grep-able). The information has no structure. I often cut and paste random stuff. Then I have a search that just pulls out entries which match all terms:For filesystems, I found the reiser guys have some very pertinent ideas, albeit in need of further development. http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.htmlFor shared stuff, I really like having an unofficial document system, and my favorite is The Moin Moin Wiki because it's fairly simple to use and install.
/charles
> The goal here is to do for email (starting with your personal mailbox) what Google did for the web...
You can always index your email, for instance using the MG 1.3 g Managing Gigabytes search engine, which as a builtin mechanism for indexing the standard UNIX INBOX-Format. (Re-indexing can be done manually with a command or automatically as a cron job). [Use only this link, because Google will point you at the outdated version 1.2.1 rather than 1.3g]
It would be nice if PINE / Mozilla etc. had plugins for a search engine, though, to avoid calling the mgquery client on the shell.
I organise my documents in the usual hierarchy, and then use the rememberance agent and emacs and it shows me a list of documents that most relate to the stuff I'm currently working on.
It's not even October, /dev/null this xmas crap! X-mas sucks hard and with comercial interestes being more obnoxious than usual and the economy sucking, the X-mas push will be horrendous enough without seeing it in goddamn September!
Please tell my boss. He assumes that I can be in more than 3 places at the same time. I have never managed to prove it was not possible. Maybe someday I will miss a deadline?
I once billed over 30 hours each for 5 different clients in the same week for a total of 164 hours. I was salaried at the time, so it did not benefit me at all. Each manager decided how many hours to bill for me. That week I started Monday at 11 AM and took off THU and FRI. Accounting was a little upset until they realized how much the invoices were worth. BTW, that company no longer exists.
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File systems are not about physical objects. Their purpose is to describe the realtionships between objects. The easiest paradigm is the Folder, which groups items. But items can be grouped by different attributes. A proposal template can be categorized under "MSWord templates", "things used by salespeople", and "things needing the approval of lawyers". The ability for it to be found in several Folders reflects the real world, even though the template only exists once.
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Building a warp generator sounds like fun. Call me in a few years when I have time to focus on it.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
I'm just putting this also after PurplePhase because I won't rise above the moderation threshold:
Following his query - do you really have some way to get email out of PST & OST versions? It would be much appreciated.
WB
budew at hotmail period com
Data just sits there, on computers that tend to just sit there most of the time. Why can't we get them to organize all that data for us?
... and this blizzard of poorly unorganized, misspelled, rumor-filled, mostly textual files became a towering stack of data in a relatively short period of time -- and this was just the crap on our PCs!
(BTW, the mainframe programs were useful for a few lookups, but were mostly worthless for getting the job done ... translate to "solve the customer's problem".)
So, I ran some ideas through my head about all this text.
Why couldn't a program crawl through all of that crapola and organize indexes from it?
... well, just about anyone who saves files and links onto their computers.
The freely- (and perhaps almost endlessly-) indexing database object ("fido"?) seems to still not exist.
... you can have good ol' fido run the range of comparisons, letting you inspect whatever index you'd care to, later, whenever, never.
I've been asking this question since the early 1990s. When I took a job at PictureTel's tech support, I really saw the need. Support data came in from customers, engineers, other techs, managers, salesmen
As it turned out, web search engines are very large versions of my initial ideas (obvious, really) but they still don't work to the levels I am still thinking about, and their sheer size is an impediment to the daily indexing needs of
It can't be that hard (the effort put into building the first versions of Netscape must have been harder). Files of text contain icons (words) that can be compared to other icons in other files. Which icons? ALL OF THEM! (With sensible exclusions, LikelyPrepositions.English.exclude.lib, etc.) It can make these comparisons exactly (ASCII matches) or as loosely as you'd care to set it (i.e. "owl"="sparrow"). OR
Hell, what does it matter? It's only CPU time and disk space. Keep that puppy chuggin' along 24hrs a day indexing stuff. They're only index files, too; by definition, smaller than the data they keep track of.
Too bad I didn't stuff all of this into a Powerpoint {tm} presentation and shop around for venture capital in 1999. He hee!
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
One time we moved across country, and my wife had a bunch of old purses in a box that she labeled "archaeological dig", figuring that it would be a less attractive target for getting ripped off somewhere in the moving process in case there was still anything valuable in them. Turned out that one of the truck drivers was an archaeologist, and was very interested in something that looked like somebody else had done some archaeology :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Outlook allows you to categorize your mailbox items. You can have many categories for each one item and then you can apply a view filter when you wish to search on each category. Other mail clients should do similar things with different names for them.
I work on a windows laptop. I use Outlook as my mail client, SpamBayes to filter out most of the spam and Nelson Email Organizer to organize my mail. I have rules set up to auto file some mail that I want to archive - family, boss, etc. I view it all through NEO. It's made dealing with a large quantity of mail much easier.
I am using a new tool called MailManager, see sourceforge . Over the last month I received over 6000 emails, half of them curtesy of SoBig and Friends. The MailManager tool allows me to share my MailBox on the Web with collegues, who will process mail while I am out.
I have started using popfile (also on sourceforge) to classify my my mail before I look at it. Thus viruses, web-site logs, bounced emails, out of office replies etc are marked as 'spam' (MailManagers term, no offence intended to virus writers). Spam is automatically deleted after a week days (long enough for me to look at the subjects incase a real message is wrongly classified).
The result of this pair of products are....
Ximian Evolution implements a concept called VFolders. No matter what folder any actual email belongs in (I have folders labelled Friends, Family, Management, Consultants, Admin and Spam), it can also belong to as many VFolders as you want - without a copy being stored there.
VFolders can be specified based on the value of any field in the email, as well as whether it's been read or not, as well as moving arbitrarily single emails to a VFolder on a whim.
So I have VFolders as well - each current and past consulting gig, each group of friends, the color blue, whether the title sounds clever, Mounds or Almond Joy, etc.
Very nifty. I have installed Ximian on my corporate, only Windows allowed laptop as well as every box at home.
-Shulgi
I generally delete everything and wait for a second request. If I don't get one - how important could it have been?
I have no problem paying a reasonable price for a fairly unique product that does what I want to and is easy enough for my wife to enjoy playing with. I would be willing--indeed, I would prefer--that there were an OSS package of equivalent capabilities and ease-of-use that ran on Linux so that I could use it on my system, but I have not yet found one. Have you?
but all versions of Microsoft Outlook (Outlook 98 was released by Microsoft as freeware, if you want to check it out, but 97 or any other version will work just fine) can do what you want quite easily;
.pst file, Lotus cc:mail, whatever; there are Outlook plug-ins for various open source backends as well) for whatever pattern you are looking for. All messages from "Joe Smith" with an attachment, sent sometime in 2001, in the "development" or "perl" categories.
Keep all your messages in one folder, and use _categories_.
One items may only be in the "sales" category. Another item may be in the "sales" category, "marketing" category, "support" category, and "BofH entertainment" categories simultaneously.
Then "group by" category in your favorite view (for you archaelogical filing system types, the timeline view might work if you have enough screen space to represent your mail over a timeline). Or you simple construct a query (advanced find) and search whatever database you have your messages stored in (Exchange server, a local
Oh yeah, and outlook runs fine under wine.
It's easy- set categories in Outlook. Click on the message Icon and add a category They give you a standard list, you can add your own categories. When you get an email don't file it, categorize it. Then make a inbox view to group by category. If a message is in two categories you will see it in both places. If you create a Meeting or a Task or a Contact item from the message by dragging, the category will move with the item. Lawrence Ricci
I am pretty sure that it is in an old Roger Zelazny (RIP) neovel, where he describes a Prof who each year spread a clean sheet over the pile of s**t on his desk, and wrote the date on the sheet. That way, when he went looking for something, when he found it, he could tell when it came from! Talk about "ls -t" before writers even used much in the way of computers! I love it!
I've wasted a lot of money in my life, the rest I spent on motorcycles and women.
You could do worse than to have a look at Retriever from 80-20 software. One of their top sales guys demoed the product to me about 9 months ago - it does integrated searching and categorisation (without having to pre-load metadata tags), similar to the search engine used by Telstra in Oz. Try searching for 'broadband' - it categorises the search results automatically (look at the left hand margin) without requiring document authors filling in masses of mandatory property sheets.
Having had a quick scan of their web page ("Check those URLs!"), it appears they are repositioning Retriever away from the individual use towards an enterprise-wide solution (e.g. point it at your file servers and Exchange box), but there might be some mileage in a single-user copy. I recall there was an evaluation version at one point, however all that's there now is a video you could look at.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with 80-20.
Aegilops
The nice thing is that it grabs text from emails, web, anything, even with images and fonts and styles, and eveh has a good search engine and categories to sort.
Let's try that again. If you take a large sample of people, and you generate random numbers (0-9) and you ask them to repeat the list of numbers just read, then you find that beyond 6-7 numbers people can't do it. That's why the phone company chose 7 digits. It's not true for everyone, but that limit does fall sharply off around there. (And it takes about 30 seconds before your short-term memory starts to loose track.)
If you play 7 tones for a person, then play one of those at random, they can recall the number for the tone. However, if you go beyond 7 choices, they can no longer distinguish the random tone.
I'm in california where the license plates are limited to 7 digits and letters. You'll find lots of similar examples.
So, the point (which I didn't make clear enough) is that we (humans) start to loose track after six, and "things" begin to feel cluttered. That's why I was suggesting that more than 6 folders for email is overkill.
You were right about my point being a weak one. I was really only referring to short term memory. You could certainly remember hundreds of email folders. My reasoning is more fuzzy than logical, and more empirical than provable (but then again aren't we?)
Ironically, I can't recall where I first read about this phenomenon, but here's a Fun test.
PS. About the telephone lookup. The one feature you need is to support a multi-line entry, then you can use it as a general index-card sort of thing...perl good
/charles
If you don't have anything against buying software you could try Emailchemy .
It worked quite well for me and it is multiplatform.