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Comment by nhebb | Hacker News Reader

The ability to organize email into folders is one of the main reasons I prefer Outlook over GMail. But as the paper mentions, "Folders can obscure as well as organize", which is where tags come in handy. What I would really like - for both email and files - is the ability to create both folders and tags quickly.

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Gmail has folders; I have the same ones I used to have in Outlook. They're called labels, and the only practical difference I've noticed is that you can have more than one label on a message, unlike folders where a message can only be in one. You can nest labels one inside another and get a nice hierarchical list of them on the left just like Outlook.

Yes, it does now, and I can't for the life of me remember when that happened. But this was a capitulation after Google long insisted that tags were totally superior.

Notice there now are options like "Move to", which basically removes the tag for the current folder - I mean tag - and applied a new tag to let people treat Gmail mostly as if it is folder based, because as it turns out a lot of us insists on folders. But that functionality didn't use to be there. Both the nesting and "acts almost like folders" actions were added at some point long after Gmail was launched.

I agree with you on documents, which tend to be small in number so you can index them manually using folders. But what about the case where you get hundreds of messages a day? If you get 300 messages a day you'll accumulate over 100K messages annually. Manual indexing seems like madness. I don't even try rule based tagging at that point.

In this latter case the gmail model is great. I leave everything in the inbox and depend on gmail (a) never to lose it and (b) to find it easily through search. In fact you can use gmail as a doc store--if there's something I really value I make it an email attachment and depend on gmail to dig it up if necessary.

I think of search as a default functionality (although it was actually pretty bad in older versions of Outlook). But from a usability standpoint, software shouldn't pigeonhole users into one method or another. Since everyone's work flow is different, it's all about providing users flexibility.

> But from a usability standpoint, software shouldn't pigeonhole users into one method or another. Since everyone's work flow is different, it's all about providing users flexibility.

I'm not sure if I agree. I think it might be better to software to excel in one specific workflow rather than attempt to cater everyone. Of course this requires the market to provide different options for different workflows.

I get hundreds of messages a day. I don't accumulate over 100k messages annually as very few of those hundreds of messages a day are necessary to retain. What isn't automatically filtered, I look at, and either delete, archive or categorise.

I don't leave everything in the inbox for the reason that I can't find what I want, in part because the search is awful. A large part of the problem is that unlike websites where pagerank and context provided by inbound links allow a lot of intelligence, with my e-mail it is often a struggle to find the right search terms, and so I want to add context in the forms of categorisation to the messages I actually have a reason to keep.

Gmails poor folder support kept me from using it for my work account for many years, until they "surrendered" from their original hardline tagging stance and added more support to allow you to treat tags like hierarchical folders, for this reason.

I can't imagine keeping an unstructured inbox like what you're describing - I wouldn't find a thing. I always despair when I have to resort to Gmails search as it almost invariably means I'm in for frustration.

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