DailyGenesis.com

I use gmail on my own domain for my personal email running on dailygenesis.com.  At Element Fusion, we also use gmail for our company’s email solution.  So, needless to say, I am a big gmail user.

However, I’m not one of these guys who digs into every feature and facet of an application right off the bat.  I’d rather just figure things out as I go along, which probably costs me a good deal of productivity in the long run, but oh well.  So, anyway, I’ve never archived a single email message in gmail ever — until now.

I figured, “why archive?”  I mean, I can just keep everything in the inbox and search for what I need, right?  Why take that extra step of clicking the “archive” button.  Seems like a waste to me.

But, I finally found a good reason.  You see, when I have emails that represent things I need to respond to or things I need to do, I need a way to keep those in front of me.  Now, I could star them or label them, but that doesn’t make them pop out at me, so I prefer to mark them as “unread”.  That way, they look very different in the box.  But, here’s the problem.  Gmail doesn’t have a way (at least that I’ve found) to show only the unread messages in your inbox.  If you know of a way to do this, please let me know because it is this, and this alone, that has led me to get into archiving.

That said, now that I’ve started archiving, I’m not sure I can go back. Once I got the 5,000+ messages sent over to “all mail,” I was left with just the “unread” messages awaiting my attention in my inbox.  I marked them as read (which I can do now, since they are the only messages in my inbox), and there is something pretty satisfying about not having any “unread” messages.  It’s somehow more peaceful.  Also, there’s something nice about “archiving” a message when you are finished with it, as if to say, “farewell, message, I have no need of you anymore.”

So, I’m not sure that I’d go back, even if there is a way to view only the unread messages, which I’m pretty sure there is not and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 8:43 am and is filed under General ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.