Simplifying and Clarifying

[Walt Hopkins]

Title: Simplifying and Clarifying

Hello,

After several hours of checking postings for the past month and wandering the wonderful Entourage Help page that Diane set up, I am back to this group. I begin to suspect that I have missed something over the years of haunting the Emailer group and now this one. What I want to do is to simplify and clarify my setup.

I am running Entourage X and my intention is to get down to a lean database because my current one no longer fits on a single backup CD. I have 2233 contacts and well over 500 folders (which I discovered when I went over the limit of eMA). So now I’m trying to get organised so I can make the archiving work.

I’m making some guesses about what might work and I would like feedback. Let me describe my current situation and what I am planning to do. Then you can tell me if this makes sense.

NOW: Most mail now comes into InBox
CHANGE: Set up more rules so that all mail goes into designated folders. And use Custom View to check incoming mail.

NOW: Most mail eventually goes into a folder for that individual with the name as First Name then Last Name. (This makes it hard to find the folder since the folders don’t list alphabetically by last name the way the address book does.)
CHANGE: Set up folders with Last Name then First Name.

NOW: Each person’s folder is a subfolder within other subfolders (such as the IFR December 02 folder, within the IFR course folder, within the Shell client folder, within the Clients folder). This gets complicated when someone takes several of my training courses. Or when someone was a support staff person at a course organiser, then a participant on a course, and now a colleague.
CHANGE: Identify people with multiple categories and then place people in much larger folders, such as Clients, Participants, Colleagues, Friends, and Family. Not sure whether to keep individual folders.

Do any or all of these changes make sense? If so, I assume that it also makes sense to do them before I do the archiving. Then I can come back to the huge database and delete all the files of people who are no longer active and work with that lean database except when I need to check the archives for some old message.

This may be perfectly obvious to some of you, but I’ve found nothing about it in the books, on the site, or here.

Thanks in advance for all ideas.

Walt

Ent X