This one won’t follow the recent trends of people who’ve been writing about Gmail. Apologies for the back-to-back Mac posts, but I’m finding my situation interesting enough that everyone could probably share in both its humor and its pity. Enjoy.
Prior to last year, I’d been an old-school Eudora user for a very long time, on both Windows and Mac. That’s the email client the HotWired IT department installed for Mac users in 1996. I just kept using it, and never tried anything else. When I switched back to the Mac last year, I decided to start anew with email and to give Apple’s Mail.app a good try. (I won’t go into issues with the name, others have already covered the topic, but I will refer to the application as simply “Mail”, with a capital M, from here on out.) Unbeknownst to me, I somehow ended up importing seven years worth of email into Mail, with no idea how many messages that actually represented.
For the most part, I think Mail is fine, and I’ve continued to use it. Although I wish Apple would iterate versions of it a little faster, and provide more a robust feature set (which I’d gladly pay for if need be). But overall, as a free app provided with Max OS X, it’s worked well enough for me since the switch, and I have no desire to try other Mac desktop email clients at this time.
The biggest annoyance appeared when first switching over to Mail. Every time I clicked on a new mailbox for the first time, Mail would suddenly scan and index that folder, then report every message in that mailbox as unread. After using it for a couple days, and successfully correcting all my read messages in my most frequently used mailboxes, my “unread messages count” went back to normal.
One piece of background information before I get to the punch line: For non-Mac users, or those who haven’t ever used Mail, by default, Mail will add a small red burst to the dock icon whenever it knows unread messages are sitting in any of your mailboxes. Inside the burst, a count of the unread messages appears (if you have dock icons sized large enough to read the number, or have magnification turned on when mousing over the dock). ![[Apple's Mail icon, showing a count of 44 unread messages.]](/log/img/200404/mail44.gif)
Among other available apps, plugins, and patches, it’s one of the convenient ways of knowing when you have new mail, and how much of it you have. So if you have 44 unread messages, the dock icon looks something like this image. When no unread messages exist, the little red burst disappears from the Mail icon.
This afternoon, I was reminded of the way Mail can suddenly “discover” unread messages in mailboxes it has never indexed. I was trying to find an old email message from someone specific, but it wasn’t showing up in the usual places I expected. I had never done a global search throughout all of Mail, but it didn’t take long to find the drop-down modifier within the search box to select the option to search “In All Mailboxes”.
Allow the following screenshot of my dock, its magnified (and unaltered) Mail icon, and my current unread messages count serve as a gentle warning to any of you who might find yourself in a similar situation with an urge to do a global search through [what is now] eight years of email. The global search forced Mail to index every mailbox and every message in my entire archive, which enabled it to suddenly discover all kinds of new unread messages it didn’t even know existed before today.
![[Screenshot of my current dock and Apple's Mail icon, showing a count of 27,385 unread messages.]](/log/img/200404/dock.gif)
Hmph. To say that I’m buried under a load of unread email right now… that’d be an understatement.
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I came across this when upgrading my dad to MacOS X a few years ago. In the “Message” menu there’s a submenu called “Mark,” in which “…As read” is an option. If you Select All the mail in a mailbox, you can use this handy option to speed things along.
As an aside, I’ve stopped using folders for my mail because Mail’s search is so fast. I just pop in the sender’s name, address, or a few key words from the message, and it returns the search results really fast.
So, if allocate an hour a day (I know its hard NOT to be tempted to read some mail :->) you can probably get through about 25 of those new messages at least. Given that it means you’ll only be going through the backlog for the next three years if you work public holidays :^)
And that doesn’t include the mail you’ll get *while* going through it!
Best of luck!
wow. i spent a good amount of time on Sunday cleaning up my inbox and was so very happy when the number of emails went from slightly over 200 to 26 (not counting archives). I was so tired and bored of reading and answering emails by the time I was done … I seriously think my computer would crash if I ever tried storing 27.000+ emails on it! Let’s not even begin to talk about how much time it would take to sift through all of that.
Dave: I’ve cut back on using multiple mailboxes/folders too. But I’ve still got 7 years of email that’s stored in tons of different folders. I wasn’t about to go back and suck all that into one folder, even an archived folder.
During HotWired and Lycos days, there was a mailbox for every different product or service, and a some co-workers sent out so much email, they got their own box too. I was box-happy, and I’ve always been a hierarchical organization freak.
I can see how that would be a problem. I pretty much started over with email when I moved up to OS X a few years ago, but after a few weeks of not using a computer (I set up my accounts on a few computers between home and work) it can sometimes add up to a few hundred.
One thing I can’t live without now, though, it Mails great Junk filter, and labeler. Saves a ton of time.
YIKES.
Glad I’ve never had that problem. Then again, I don’t keep e-mail. I’ve always said your best friend when it comes to e-mail management is the “delete” key. Second best? Cell phone.
Works for me, but I’m quite sure it’s not for everyone. I’m pretty low tech when it comes to some things. E-mail. Urls…
I’m not very good at the habit of archiving old email (read: more than two years) not is something I sweat a lot, actually. If I really wanted to archive a message, a paper copy is more secure in my case.
At this time, my unread Mail (yeah, the OS X app) messages go through 150 and counting. Slowly but surely “getting there”… Not something I’m exactly proud of :S
If you use iChat, you could always install the very excellent iChatStatus which can, amongst other things, display a live count of your unread messages or junk messages as your iChat status. And it’s free!
Do you really need e-mail from 7 years ago? Are you archiving for the sake of archiving?
How many of those 27,000 messages are actually useful?
That is interesting that it displays the count from what I assume is all your folders combined. My dock icon currently sits at 32, but that is for only the inbox. I have several other sub folders for different listservs with over 12000 in one and 8000 in another but they don’t show up on the dock icon badge.
hmmm…
I heard of a guy who had grown tired of the QWERTY keyboard layout and wanted to make his own, customized for his personal usage. Having archived all the mail he had ever written as well as all the code and what not, he pulled it all into a small program that he had made for the purpose. And analysing all this text, the program figured out which keys had seen the most use and which had seen the least, allowing him to make a 100% optimized keyboard layout.
Some geeks huh?…
(I of course only have my as far back as December last year, so I can’t do that :()
Command-A, Message->Mark as Read. (Or Command-Shift U)
sorry for the double comment. Didn’t read the first comment thoroughly. didn’t mean to repeat. :)
I came across the same thing when I moved from Entourage to Mail, back when I was trying to go all OS X and Office X hadn’t been released.
Now, with the Panther version of Mail, a simple right-click on the offending mailbox and at the bottom of the menu you can select “mark all as read”… i like that one, especially for my mailing lists mailbox which I don’t read as much as I should.
As for the “full count” in the dock icon, I use a Mail plug-in called “MailEnhancer” to enable that. Don’t know if that’s what Doug uses…
Ah, thanks Paul. I forgot about MailEnhancer, which I’m definitely using. I find it handy to have the red “badge” (as I should have called it) display a count for all mailboxes since I have several Rules in place to filter messages to different boxes. Even if there are no unread messages in my In box, I might still have new mail in other boxes.
with regards to Email volume, my 12 years of mail in my Apple Mail app counts like:
12 years
150 000 messages
1.6 Gb of mails
Around 1200 folders
26.000 individual email adresses
luckily enough I have my own server
Interesting…
Note my calcs…
1996 - 366 days
2000 - 366 days
2004 - 366 days
But you posted in 14 april 2004
From 01 january to 14 april goes 105 days
5 years * 365 days = 1825 days
1996 year days + 2000 year days + 105 days = 837
Lets sum everything…
1825+837 = 2662 days
you have 27385 emails
27385 / 2662 = 10,2 emails/day
You store about 10 mails each day…
Interesting :D
Interesting calculations Jorge. Except that the number (27K) doesn’t represent all the email I have stored. It only represents the mailboxes I had previously never viewed in Mail, so Mail hadn’t indexed those mailboxes yet. Those were the only messages marked as unread.
In reality, I estimate that my actual count of messages stored in Mail is 4 or 5 times that amount. But without some type of statistics report within Mail, I really have no idea.
Thanks for the math though…
Have you ever thought of using one application to receive the email, and another to store archived mail? My problem is similar but different in the respect that I get a flood of email daily. It doesn’t all need reading but it does need archiving in a searchable format. Take a look at the figures in these screenshots…
The email flood screenshots.
…and you will see what I mean. If anyone knows of a good email archive / searchable store app then please let me know. I’d love to use it to get these numbers down!
Mondo - Ever tried zoe? It might do what you want. Seems pretty nifty to me.
http://zoe.nu
Ive just lost all of my email - so i have the exact oposite experience…
And here I was thinking my 360 e-mails in two days for 1 e-mail was horrible. Won’t count up all 7 e-mail accounts though. I promise…I won’t ever complain again as I sort them.
And yes, I archive into folders, and have folders within folders to keep organized. 8~}
I used to keep every letter (excluding spam of course), I kept quite organized and I was so proud of it. I had about 800Mb of letters when I lost all my mail. Guess how disappointed I was. I was so surprised when I realized a couple of weeks later that I needed only some latest letters… Now I have “a cleaning day” once a month when I delete old letters and save most important ones to a separate folder.
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