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I just checked and I have 45744 emails in my gmail. I agree though, why waste time filing stuff when you can just search the lot? You still end up searching anyway, just on a smaller subset of emails.
If you had 39,676 letters from banks, utility companies, council, insurance companies etc etc would you put them all randomly in a single huge drawer? I wouldn’t and that’s the principle I apply to emails
But if you could open your drawer and go "hey drawer, give me my council tax bills for the last three years" and have them magically in your hand in a split second, would you then still be fannying about administering multiple drawers? Because
if a small up-front effort filing reduces the time and effort spent identifying them
it doesn't.
As a real-world example, I just found in a few seconds the size, type and cost of pond liner that I bought an unknown number of years ago from a company whose name I couldn't remember. I didn't have to wonder about whether I had filed it with other garden stuff or receipts or arranged by year or...whatever. I can't see how folders could possibly have helped me.
Paper OTOH isn't readily searchable and requires more careful and time-consuming treatment. Which is one reason I try to avoid it.
To everyone stating the bleedin' obvious - that gmail is wonderfully searchable - yes, we know! I posted a link to the list of search operators available in gmail, FFS.
molgrips said "I now need to migrate to another system" so I believe that means moving away from gmail (and thereby losing its great search functionality).
If you think that a standard email client or set of offline files is equally capable then you may be in for a surprise.
The filing cabinet analogy was to illustrate my point that I find filing emails in folders useful, not that it is compulsory.
Just migrate them to another Gmail account then?
I do all my mail management on thunderbird, dating to well before I had always-on access... I don't use gmail web interface at all if I can avoid it. Didn't occur to me that you might need gmail's super-clever searching and filtering to just search a mailbox.