Organizing emails

[JAE]

In yesteryears engineering firms would communicate via telephone or regular "snail" mail.

For telephones one would potentially record the general topics of conversation with perhaps a pre-made company telephone memo form.

Both the letters and the memos would go into the project file. Thus, at any one time you could look into the file and have a complete history of the various communications that took place.

Today, much of our communication is by email and still much by telephone.

I was wondering how many of you deal with the challenge of documenting emails and saving them in "project files" to be able to return to them in the future if needed? I know a number of engineers who simply let their in box fill up with vast quantities of emails and, under Microsoft Outlook, they get archived somewhere as time passes.

This doesn't seem like a good plan.

What do you all do?

 

[csd72]

that only works if you remember what it was called (or the client gives it a recognisable label).

I archive into project files though this is often done only when I run out of space on the server.

I try my best to be organised with these types of things. It is easy to dismiss these things as non technical but, as one of my old bosses explained to me once: 'most clients have absolutely no understanding of how good an engineer is technically, what they judge you on is if you get the jobs done on time, how efficient you are to answer their queries and how neat your drawings are.'

Sad but true!

 

[kontiki99]

I've found that Desktop Search generally lets me pick a keyword to search on to vastly narrow the choices, for a scan to find what I'm looking for almost every time.

It almost doesn't matter how I've filed or misfiled what ever it is.

 

[MikeHalloran]

On Windows computers, I've been using Agent Ransack for search; it runs pretty fast, can search on content, and doesn't have some of the odd behaviors/limitations/bugs of MS Search.



Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[lweiss4]

The first thing I do is create a rule in Outlook to save all attachments to a folder, which I then can access and use as needed. Then I deal with all incoming email with a program called AutoMate:

http://www.pergenex.com/index.shtml.

I set it so that after I'm done with an email, I put it in a "Sorting Folder" that I've created, and it automatically strips all attachments (but leaves a note about what was there) and sorts all emails (into my pst folders) according to criteria that I've set (keywords, recipients, etc.). I've also set it automatically put all sent emails into the Sorting Folder for the same process. So at the end of the day, if I've dealt with my inbox emails and placed them in the Sorting Folder, then everything is sorted into the various pst's, without attachments (to limit the size of my inbox), and I am ready for a new day of incoming emails.