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Congrats to Google on shipping! Side question: am I the only person fully satisfied by my email workflow? I practice inbox 0- if an email is in my inbox, it me

by GuiA 12y ago

Congrats to Google on shipping! Side question: am I the only person fully satisfied by my email workflow? I practice inbox 0- if an email is in my inbox, it means something needs to be done about it (whether it's replying, filing a bug report, writing a patch, etc). Once it's done, it gets archived. I star the stuff that I'll need to refer to later, like tickets for a flight or concert. I then have a few server side rules to do things like mark certain classes of emails as read (eg build logs, mailing lists), so as to not flood my phone with notifications. And... that's it. (edit: oh and yes, I am also very diligent about unsubscribing from the stuff I know will never be relevant, rather than just archiving it and forgetting about it until another email from the same source comes up a week later. After a few weeks of consistently practicing this, your inbox gets much better) I get probably a few hundred emails a day at most (work+personal), and this system works great for me. I know people like Paul Graham think email is utterly broken, but when you're at their level I'm not sure ~any~ tool will be satisfying - they're absolutely outliers. So HNers, do you really have a problem with your email workflow, or is everyone just repeating "email is broken" because some smart people with an ungodly amount of email said so?

therealdrag0 12y ago
I'm with you. Inbox never should have more than 15 items. Everything else is unlikely to be looked at again and gets thrown into an archive folder (Business/Orders/Correspondence). If I get mail I don't want, then I unsubscribe. I'm also on the lighter side of email load/work, but I don't see how a simple/efficient/clean workflow like this could be improved.
Demiurge 12y ago
You're definitely not the only one. I think these 'email is broken' changes are aimed at people who use smartphones and tablets that didn't use PCs before, trying to make it more chat client like. I think this might be a market force, but it definitely tramples traditional email, which is long form, non-instant, textual (not visual) communication medium.
spindritf 12y ago
I practice inbox 0 Yeah. And with a few (well, 119) filters, it's actually pretty rare that an e-mail hits my inbox. Rare enough to have notifications on my phone enabled.
- gibrown 12y ago
  The fact that you had to configure and maintain 119 filters is the indication that email is broken IMO.
  - spindritf 12y ago
    I accumulated them over the years.
  - Mithaldu 12y ago
    With the right software (Opera Mail) filters learn from what you drag into them and out of them. So there's no maintenance necessary to speak of.
  - k-mcgrady 12y ago
    >> "The fact that you had to configure and maintain 119 filters is the indication that email is broken IMO." Maybe it's not broken, maybe it's just being used by people in a way it wasn't meant to be. I bet a lot of people's email 'conversations' would work better in a chat app (i.e. they don't need an easily searchable record and they aren't typing long messages).
  - r00fus 12y ago
    I have 63 filters right now for my personal mail, somewhat less (17) for my work email where I am a bit more diligent about sorting (and where filters can be more complex). 119 is completely sane.
    - gibrown 12y ago
      Of course its sane. I also have over a hundred. But if your system requires that I manually build and maintain hundreds of filters I still think something is broken. Its just an awful user experience.
DannyBee 12y ago
"So HNers, do you really have a problem with your email workflow, or is everyone just repeating "email is broken" because some smart people with an ungodly amount of email said so?" I did :) I found my personal email a mess. I have a lot of mailing lists i need to "semi" pay attention to, and get about 1000+ emails a day all told. This was pretty messy to manage, even with foldering/labeling/etc and such. Inbox is pretty nice for my workflow (i'm sure there are some it is good for, and some it is bad for). I have it figure out the importance of various mailing list messages, and then show them to me once a day per mailing list. I mark the ones i care about with pins or reminders, and it takes care of reminding me. On the work side, i get even more email, and i don't have a great workflow there. But i'm completely an outlier. I essentially have two distinct jobs I do for the company. Practicing inbox zero in either case is unlikely to work for various reasons (among other things, most of my job is not predicated on making quick decisions but on thoughtful ones I could just move everything to task lists, but it would just create another place with the same info and often a worse interface)
jpetersonmn 12y ago
I'm with you, we use gmail on our work email now and I just use the google app sync so I can keep using outlook. I think regular old email from the 90's works fantastic.
matkam 12y ago
I too practice "inbox 0," and making sure I am very diligent about unsubscribing from mailing lists and creating the occasional filter. I am completely content with email, and I feel like this is more for people who never hit the "archive" button. This is why I use stock gmail over Dropbox's Mailbox. And I am afraid that if I start using Google's Inbox, my inbox will just get cluttered and I won't be able to go back.
- DINKDINK 12y ago
  can you explain to me the advantage of archiving a message over just letting it rest in a read state in your inbox? I've never been able to see an added value to it.
  - grayclhn 12y ago
    The value can be small (or nonexistent), but I like to know that everything in my inbox needs to be acted on/processed, rather than having to determine whether I've already done it or not. You can do this while leaving everything in the inbox by toggling the read/unread tags, but I'd rather not. Similarly, I've never seen the advantage of leaving old emails in my inbox rather than just archiving everything without labeling it.
    - DINKDINK 12y ago
      ah, my approach has been anything in my inbox that is unread is either requiring of action on it, or unread.
      - organsnyder 12y ago
        The problem I have when I've used that strategy is that then I need to skim all of the emails and recall the state of each one. I find it to be both distracting and stressful—I'm reminded of every task I need to accomplish (or, at least, the most recent 20) whenever I check my email. For my work email, I try to practice inbox-0. Every message either gets an immediate action, or it's filed away as a task on my todo list (including the URL for the message in Gmail), and then archived.
gk1 12y ago
I set aside time every Monday for getting to "inbox zero." That's when I go through every email in my inbox -- including those I've let linger for the past week -- and do one of the following: - If it requires a task and I can do it within 2 minutes, then I just do it. - If it requires a task that'll take more than 2 minutes, I schedule the task on my calendar and archive the email. - If it's just for future reference (eg, flight confirmation), I add an appropriate label ("Travel") and archive it. - If it's none of the above, then it either gets archived or just deleted. So I don't have the problem that Inbox is trying to solve. What I'm wondering is will this eventually be forced onto all users, whether we need it or not?
- sprokolopolis 12y ago
  The video on the blog post says that it is separate from Gmail and that you are welcome to use both. I assume they plan on keeping it that way.
sz4kerto 12y ago
I have tried all kinds of intelligent note taking apps, GMail workflows, and so on. At the moment I think that the Unix philosophy works here as well: I use simple but working tools and I build my workflow on/with them instead of using a complex, big app/infrastructure that tries to find out what I'm interested in. So I'm stuck with an email provider that follows standards, and I feel good about being able to move to another provider, etc. in case I want to do so. In most cases, I know what I want, and I am OK with opening the app that can do the job for me. However, I want that app work properly and always. That's why I don't find Google Now too appealing: I don't want a personal assistant who tries to figure out what I want. I want a personal assistant that can do what I want when I ask for it. I don't need an app that scrapes my email for airline tickets -- I need an app that makes me easy to look up delays and departure times. I don't want an app that sets an alarm clock automatically when I have a meeting because there are two cases: 1) I need an alarm, but then I need to be 100% sure that it's set (and I don't want to double check whether magical AI figured it out properly) 2) I don't need an alarm (so I don't want my personal assistant to set up one). I cannot risk missing somethink: if it's not important, I'll try to unsubscribe. But that's only my use case. Ah, and +1: I don't want to keep emails. If I don't want to retain some information, then I just delete it -- there's no search algorithm in sight thats accuracy is independent of the search space. More emails, items -> less effective search.
lordbusiness 12y ago
I too consider email to be a perfectly working system and I have achieved "inbox 0" since I started using email in 1994. IBM drilled it into me that my inbox wasn't meant to be a 'pending' queue, and as such I should action items or clear them out. That and some general common sense has added up to me being bewildered when people discuss how difficult email is. I really hope that doesn't come off as snarky, because it's not meant to be! :-)
Rezo 12y ago
I wouldn't say I have a problem with email as it is today, but I am the exact opposite of you; I never archive or organize any of my email (besides rules for labeling email lists and groups so they directly bypass my inbox). I appear to have 11,600+ emails in my Gmail inbox. If I need something, I just search for it. As the Gmail search is really, really, good, I can pretty much instantly bring up any thread. I therefore don't see any value in spending even a second of time in trying to organize a piece of email. I also really like the "Social" and "Promotions" tabs Gmail added, it's like a smart filter for "unimportant stuff" that I don't even need to bother looking at but can search for if needed. I look forward to Inbox automating and highlighting actionable items even more (check in for flight etc, should just be a button press without even opening the email). I would rather apply a label, or mark a message as unread (this is what I typically do), if it is something I need to return to later. Most emails can either be directly acted upon, or don't require a followup at a later time, so optimizing the common case down to "do nothing" makes sense for me.
- smacktoward 12y ago
  I do the same thing, only in Thunderbird over IMAP with around 27,000 messages. TB search is fast and accurate, and I keep track of emails that need immediate action by starring them and then un-starring them after the action is taken. Pretty straightforward.
- ricket 12y ago
  I think you have to really consciously process your email though, in order for your system to work. I have gotten really bad at email lately and it's because of this: I leave my emails in my inbox like you. Except I archive something that I'm really, truly done with (never wanna see it again, not even for reference; archive = trash). But now my inbox is a mix of things I haven't yet read, I've read but haven't acted on, things I've read and keep in my inbox for reference, and things that I'm done with but I'm ignoring them so hard that they never actually get archived like they should. "Mark as unread" is used at a whim, usually when I read something on my phone and think "I should read this on my computer" so I flag it unread to make sure it stands out. Nothing is starred, except I have colored stars and mark a bill with a green star before I archive it (this is a remnant of a system I tried in the past but didn't fully stick). As a result, I end up missing or not doing things, and re-reading emails I've already done, and my inbox is just a big chronologically-ordered mess. This is my personal email anyway. My work email I'm a little more careful with, but it also piles up over time and rarely something will slip through the cracks. Outlook's flag/reminder system is decent at least, so it's manageable, but it still at times feels disorganized and just not quite how I want it to be.
timfrietas 12y ago
I also use inbox zero, but it took me 15 years to get to that point. That's quite a learning curve, and not built into email at all--it's something you have to discover outside of Gmail or any other email client. Combine that with the fact that the most recent generation is using email less and less, and products built around email are bound to evolve in order to remain relevant.
kin 12y ago
I also do inbox 0 the exact same way you do but sometimes it's not enough. For example, if an online retailer sends me promotions I don't care about, I'd like them to be auto-archived for when I actually feel like buying something, but I don't want to miss my purchase confirmations. Google's new categories help and Inbox sounds promising but I feel like there's too much assumption going on in parsing the emails. Really, I'd like email addresses to be on the domain level. For example, mail@cool_username.gmail.com and flights@cool_username.gmail.com. Then, give me granular control over how "mail" or "flights" get categorized and give me nested categories.
- puls 12y ago
  Check out plus addressing! Not part of any standard, but supported by Gmail and many other email providers. http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-your.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-m...
  - kin 12y ago
    I've tried plus addressing. Some websites annoyingly don't accept them :(
  - sib 12y ago
    The plus sign has been a valid character in email addresses since 1982 (RFC 822). See page 8: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc822.html http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc822.html
- nicwolff 12y ago
  I filter all messages with the word "unsubscribe" in the body into a "Bulk Mail" folder that I check once a week, works beautifully. As for the per-category addressing, you can add "+flights" to your username when subscribing to flight notifications and then filter on that however you like...
- enobrev 12y ago
  I've been wanting something similar, but in the form of automated expiration after a certain amount of time (able to set "expiration" to either "Archive" or "Trash" in said rule). For example, I'd love to be able to add a rule so that certain "deal" emails (those to which I'm purposely subscribed) to expire after say 1 day or 1 week - whatever the standard time for the sender's deals to typically last. Then on the occasion that I end up in the woods, whether literally or figuratively, and unable to maintain my email for a couple days, I don't end up with an overwhelming and generally self-perpetuating inbox debt
wink 12y ago
I seem to be the only person in the world whose email is only broken since forced to use GMail on a work account (and Thunderbird totally fails at using the IMAP thing). I mean, searching for "vpn" doesn't give me the mail that contains "openvpn"? Or it's that incompatible to my workflow that not even RTFM works...
- zorbo 12y ago
  Search is hilariously bad in all email clients, including gmail. Google managed to solve searching on the web by just throwing enough information in it until you kinda always got what you wanted to know. But that doesn't work for email, because there just isn't more info to throw at it than what's in your mailbox. You need to actually have decent search algorithms. And those are apparently too difficult to write, since not a single mail client out there does it right. Grep does a better job.
  - petepete 12y ago
    Not all email clients. http://notmuchmail.org/ http://notmuchmail.org/
    - ams6110 12y ago
      Thanks for mentioning that. I use notmuch and the emacs mode for my email. It's absolutely the best email experience I've ever had.
- aiiane 12y ago
  I bet I could find plenty of people that would consider search to be broken if searching for vpn did return openvpn results. (Or the slightly less loaded example, if searching for 'man' returned results with 'almanac'.)
rip747 12y ago
I'm with you. currently i have 3 emails in my inbox. the rest are archived. Like 85% of the population, my inbox is a todo list not a social engagement.
Chris911 12y ago
Exact same flow here.
Tehnix 12y ago
Have you considered using Mailbox[0]? I also do the Inbox Zero thing, and absolutely love the overview it gives me of what I need to do. With Mailbox, you'll "snooze" mails and it'll be like they get delivered to you at the later specified time. I recently sat my parents down, installed mailbox on their devices, and instructed them how to use the app. Amazingly enough, they now constantly use it, and aim for the zero inbox (they are people that would have to write down what ctrl-c does, and didn't know about ctrl-z...). [0] http://www.mailboxapp.com http://www.mailboxapp.com EDIT: If it wasn't clear; I'm also very satisfied my with mail flow :)
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  I liked Mailbox but Dropbox own it and I'm more and more concerned about how they handle my privacy. Add to that that for Mailbox to work your emails have to be stored on their servers (AFAIK, please tell me if I'm wrong) I switched away.
  - Tehnix 12y ago
    Only the snoozed mails are stored until they are redelivered, as far as I can tell, but I can see your point. I personally don't care that much about privacy, if the convenience gains are high enough :) "Mailbox stores a subset of your emails temporarily in order to redeliver snoozed emails, provide fast delivery and provide push notifications. We encrypt all communication to and from the Mailbox app, and all information cached on our servers is stored in an encrypted format." [0] [0] http://www.mailboxapp.com/help/#/search?query=mailbox%20store http://www.mailboxapp.com/help/#/search?query=mailbox%20stor...
  - frogpelt 12y ago
    How much less trustworthy is Dropbox than Google?
    - k-mcgrady 12y ago
      Google already has my emails (Gmail). If I use Mailbox I'm throwing another party into the mix. Google continues to get them and now Dropbox gets some of them too. It would be best to use the service of the company that gets them either way (Google). Why give your email to two companies when you can give them to one and get the same features?
epalm 12y ago
To those who think inbox-0 is a waste of time, because you can just search for email, so why spend even a second organizing it: what causes you to remember to reply to an email sent to you 3 days ago, which is now the 119th email in your inbox? I subscribe to inbox-0 because emails in my inbox need attention of some kind. I'm not advocating spending an inordinate amount of time organizing every email with labels and filters. Just "inbox == needs attention, not-inbox == I can safely forget about it".
- mncolinlee 12y ago
  Honestly, the workaround I always used for this is starring the e-mail or Boomerang it if it's really important. Also, mailing lists and social coupons get filtered immediately. Boomerang is pretty similar to some features of Inbox.
- hrktb 12y ago
  I receive hundreds of useless mails everyday (not filterable spam, just thing I don't care about or have no valuable information), so dealing with each of them to empty the inbox is a waste of time. Most mail that matters come from specific people (close family, project members, current client...) so it's easy to search, the unexpected important mails and things that needs to be done later just need to be starred. I feel it's really efficient when the signal/noise ratio is very low.
  - mytochar 12y ago
    It sounds like you're doing an adaptation of Inbox Zero anyway. It's Inbox-Starred rather than Inbox Zero, which to me sounds like what someone would do if their email didn't have an archive option. Or for people that generally don't like archival. Personally, I didn't like archival at first, but now I'm quite addicted to it Full Disclosure: I'm a Inbox Zero-er.
_greim_ 12y ago
You're not satisfied with email itself, you're satisfied with your filtering software, plus your rigorous discipline, plus email. I don't think email is necessarily broken, so much as woefully incomplete for the kinds of tasks it's typically used for.
perlpimp 12y ago
same here. there was a while ago article about usefulness of these manual organizer interfaces. they just don't work. what works is a system that can infer what you need to do from what you have done before give you maximum shortcut value. Example was presented - in facebook if you enter school you've been to you can post messages to these people - to field gets macro selector for your friends that have attended same school you did. usually if I can't remember something - i usually don't really need to do that. I will definetly won't engage in this pseudo work. Also how does this pass 20/80 test? Well good on google. this sort of reminds me buzz they had. but I haven't played with this yet.
ajhit406 12y ago
I'm also an inbox-zero practitioner and am fully satisfied with my current email workflow with one caveat -- for "waiting on" or "not relevant now" emails, I need a way to bring them back to my inbox at some estimated time in the future to be revisited. I found Boomerang (http://www.boomeranggmail.com/ http://www.boomeranggmail.com/) a year ago, and it's been amazing for keeping inbox-zero (and my sanity). I average about 300 emails a day and most of them aren't immediately relevant. I then label them with their context(s) and boomerang them when I think they'll be actionable. It's an amazing workflow, and I honestly think Google could just offer some type of "resend me this email later" (maybe even with a small note to myself) and would solve 90% of people's workflow problems.
- anarchitect 12y ago
  Fully agree with this. Boomerang has really been the only way my inbox has remained exclusively actionable items that are not blocked by waiting for people to reply. I haven't seen Inbox yet, but it sounds like the "snooze" feature might solve this problem for many people.
lifeformed 12y ago
Only a few hundred emails a day? How do you get any work done?! I get a few dozen and it's a huge distraction.
- VLM 12y ago
  I can provide a personal example, I work at a place where we have one and only one ticketing / bug tracking system, but it can't be used for ticketing / bug tracking because its only to be used in hyper procedural, formalized manner solely to generate numerical metrics. All actual ticket tracking / bug tracking work is organized manually by each individual in email. Not entirely unlike how most corporations use Excel as their corporate standard database, although excel isn't technically a database. So email is not a ticketing system, but for us, it is. A few hundred emails is not terribly unusual per day. Filtering strategies are vital. Topic drift away from the subject line is strongly discouraged. This is at one of the largest companies in the world.
SonicSoul 12y ago
inbox-0 or not, it is still very helpful to use the multiple inbox feature in gmail [0], I've separated mine into "inbox", "follow up", "upcoming events", "to read". this way the screen is utilized better and i can actually see agenda.. also archive them after moving so that inbox only has items that still need attention.. Most people probably don't realize the cognitive effort they waste on re-parsing the same messages in inbox over and over and over again. I also tried to engineer a sort of self-destruction messages. The kind that are relevant for a day or few but don't need to be kept. I added the rules to mark those as "disposable" and once in a while i just nuke them from my inbox. This is still a manual step so it would be nice if something like a self destructive message label was invented in case el Goog is watching this [0] http://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-to-use-gmail-more http://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-t...
- LocalPCGuy 12y ago
  I love Multiple Inbox for work emails, although for home I don't. My work email tends to get a bit cluttered during a project, but I try to get back to Inbox 0 when I get a moment to go through things. My Multiple Inboxes are: Unread Inbox, Starred, Action/WaitingOn labels, Drafts and Unread (non-inbox). I had to add the last one as I was missing emails I hadn't read but had setup filters for. This deprioritizes them, but I still see them, and I can easily just mark them as read as they generally don't require much attention. The other tip I'd say is learning the basics of keyboard shortcuts - I can open, assess and archive/delete an email very quickly because I use e/# (archive/delete respectively). I can burn through the unimportant emails very quickly that way.
tomkarlo 12y ago
I'm an inbox-zero-er (and Googler) and I love using Inbox for that exact reason - it makes it even easier for me to deal quickly with emails I don't want to touch (e.g. promotional), and snooze emails I can't act on immediately so they'll come back next week or whenever I need to follow up on them. That means I can have an even more focused inbox that just contains things I need to think about / respond to right now. In comparison, I still use regular gmail for my work email and I have maybe a dozen emails sitting in there that I don't need to do anything about right now but need to follow up on soon. IMHO, Inbox basically takes the stuff that inbox-zero folks had to learn to do manually, and makes a lot of it automated. It's particularly great on mobile.
- mbesto 12y ago
  > IMHO, Inbox basically takes the stuff that inbox-zero folks had to learn to do manually, and makes a lot of it automated. It's particularly great on mobile. But the manual intervention is precisely what makes my zero-inbox so effective. It's also agnostic to the device/application. If I leave something unread on a device it's unread somewhere else and vice versa. If one calls it "save for later", I don't know if that also means "unread".
  - tomkarlo 12y ago
    Why does manual intervention (per se) make your zero-inbox so effective? This isn't somehow magically processing emails for you, it's just automating how those emails are handled after you decide what to do with them. IIRC inbox-zero says you should file all of those to a "next week" or "next month" category and then once a week go through that inbox. This effectively removes the need to do that chore, because you can just say "put this back in front of me a week/month from now." I don't see why this is any less "device agnostic" than any other method. You can use Inbox on mobile or desktop and they stay in sync; in fact, you can use Inbox on mobile and traditional Gmail on desktop (or vice-versa) and they'll stay in sync as well. (And you do in fact konw if the email is unread or not, since that's a separate bit of status info. You can snooze an email without reading it.)
veidr 12y ago
Nope you are not alone. IMAP (despite being a technical mess behind the scenes) is my favorite computer technology of all time and has benefitted my life immensely. I would rather have today's email and no modern web than the reverse. I don't do inbox zero, I do inbox 50k. I just let mail pile up--why not? It only stresses you out if you let it (I don't). Even with a million messages, it's instantly searchable with any decent mail client--and since it is standard IMAP you can use a bunch of different clients just like you use 3-4 different web browsers at the same time. I have automated filters for stuff like Amazon that's key to my daily life but that I don't usually want to actually see, and the only manual organization I do is annual: I have folders like 2013, 2012, etc back to 1994 (containing all mail in and out). This started because in the old days clients bogged down with more than 20,000 or so messages in one folder. That's mostly not the case these days, but I like the yearly organization, and organizing my correspondence once a year isn't really too annoying, so I continue to do it this way. I have routed all my faxes and voicemail to my email for 15+ years, too. And it works on every device I own. For years and years and years. I think email is about as perfect as computer tech ever gets. Usually instant (but tolerant of a multi-day outage), completely standard and future-proof data, that works on virtually every device and platform currently in use. Email needs to be disrupted about as much as the hammer needs to be disrupted.
- pearjuice 12y ago
  You read your email once a year? Did I miss something?
  - veidr 12y ago
    Indeed, you did. I read my email whenever I want. I spend time manually moving/filing/archiving my email about once a year.
    - andygates 12y ago
      "Select all last-year mail, archive. Done." :)
- DanielBMarkham 12y ago
sytelus 12y ago
Emails have several issues: Large % of emails are newsletters, notifications, offers and promotions. This is not spam (I think we have got that under control). These are the things you intentionally subscribed to and "nice to know" but not important or urgent. Email clients are utterly oblivious to identifieng and ranking them (Gmail's Priority Inbox is rather dumb baby steps). Replying to threads and quoting previous replies is a pain. Threads become too long with several different colored highlights all over. There is no easy way to control your membership in email conversation. It's hard to get out and hard to get in. Creating groups is high friction. Sharing previous conversations with someone or a group is non-practical. Most email clients rank emails using date time. You can say that 70% of the human generated content uses perhaps most naive ranking algorithm. It is mind boggling that we still don't use signals like age of conversation, length, participants, topic, embedded action items etc. Even in 2014, most email clients will happily push email sent at 9AM for your house on fire after the benign Groupon promotion sent on 10 AM. Emails are free form and there are poorly defined standards standards to add structured data such as reminders and action items for recipients, auto-expiration, callback number etc. You can't share your "like" or upvote/downvotes for emails sent to a group. This severally limits how much social expression can be attached to emails flowing within a group.
- taeric 12y ago
  This doesn't really make it not spam. After a while, I do have to wonder why quite a few of my emails aren't just items in an RSS feed.
dmourati 12y ago
Same. I had an inbox zero policy before that was a thing. It's the only sane way to deal with email. Count today: ~100 work emails. Most take less than a second of time. Some, require <1 minute to reply. The outliers are the ones that require me to do actual work beyond email but those are luckily usually communicated otherwise.
aeze 12y ago
I don't have a problem with my e-mail workflow, it took a while and much effort to get to that point though.
72deluxe 12y ago
I don't find email broken (I use gmail). I typically have multiple emails in the inbox ready to be 'worked on' if they're unread. If they're read, I've done something with them (and it stops my phone flashing at me constantly). Then, at the end of every month I fetch all mail via POP3 and delete all emails from my inbox. The same goes for my phone (I use SMSBackup+ on Android). But I still have my "offline" archive of data on my laptop, which I then backup once a month too. (Thanks TimeMachine).

by GuiA 12y ago

therealdrag0 12y ago

I'm with you. Inbox never should have more than 15 items. Everything else is unlikely to be looked at again and gets thrown into an archive folder (Business/Orders/Correspondence). If I get mail I don't want, then I unsubscribe. I'm also on the lighter side of email load/work, but I don't see how a simple/efficient/clean workflow like this could be improved.

Demiurge 12y ago

You're definitely not the only one. I think these 'email is broken' changes are aimed at people who use smartphones and tablets that didn't use PCs before, trying to make it more chat client like. I think this might be a market force, but it definitely tramples traditional email, which is long form, non-instant, textual (not visual) communication medium.

spindritf 12y ago

I practice inbox 0 Yeah. And with a few (well, 119) filters, it's actually pretty rare that an e-mail hits my inbox. Rare enough to have notifications on my phone enabled.

gibrown 12y ago
The fact that you had to configure and maintain 119 filters is the indication that email is broken IMO.
- spindritf 12y ago
  I accumulated them over the years.
- Mithaldu 12y ago
  With the right software (Opera Mail) filters learn from what you drag into them and out of them. So there's no maintenance necessary to speak of.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  >> "The fact that you had to configure and maintain 119 filters is the indication that email is broken IMO." Maybe it's not broken, maybe it's just being used by people in a way it wasn't meant to be. I bet a lot of people's email 'conversations' would work better in a chat app (i.e. they don't need an easily searchable record and they aren't typing long messages).
- r00fus 12y ago
  I have 63 filters right now for my personal mail, somewhat less (17) for my work email where I am a bit more diligent about sorting (and where filters can be more complex). 119 is completely sane.
  - gibrown 12y ago
    Of course its sane. I also have over a hundred. But if your system requires that I manually build and maintain hundreds of filters I still think something is broken. Its just an awful user experience.

DannyBee 12y ago

"So HNers, do you really have a problem with your email workflow, or is everyone just repeating "email is broken" because some smart people with an ungodly amount of email said so?" I did :) I found my personal email a mess. I have a lot of mailing lists i need to "semi" pay attention to, and get about 1000+ emails a day all told. This was pretty messy to manage, even with foldering/labeling/etc and such. Inbox is pretty nice for my workflow (i'm sure there are some it is good for, and some it is bad for). I have it figure out the importance of various mailing list messages, and then show them to me once a day per mailing list. I mark the ones i care about with pins or reminders, and it takes care of reminding me. On the work side, i get even more email, and i don't have a great workflow there. But i'm completely an outlier. I essentially have two distinct jobs I do for the company. Practicing inbox zero in either case is unlikely to work for various reasons (among other things, most of my job is not predicated on making quick decisions but on thoughtful ones I could just move everything to task lists, but it would just create another place with the same info and often a worse interface)

jpetersonmn 12y ago

I'm with you, we use gmail on our work email now and I just use the google app sync so I can keep using outlook. I think regular old email from the 90's works fantastic.

matkam 12y ago

I too practice "inbox 0," and making sure I am very diligent about unsubscribing from mailing lists and creating the occasional filter. I am completely content with email, and I feel like this is more for people who never hit the "archive" button. This is why I use stock gmail over Dropbox's Mailbox. And I am afraid that if I start using Google's Inbox, my inbox will just get cluttered and I won't be able to go back.

DINKDINK 12y ago
can you explain to me the advantage of archiving a message over just letting it rest in a read state in your inbox? I've never been able to see an added value to it.
- grayclhn 12y ago
  The value can be small (or nonexistent), but I like to know that everything in my inbox needs to be acted on/processed, rather than having to determine whether I've already done it or not. You can do this while leaving everything in the inbox by toggling the read/unread tags, but I'd rather not. Similarly, I've never seen the advantage of leaving old emails in my inbox rather than just archiving everything without labeling it.
  - DINKDINK 12y ago
    ah, my approach has been anything in my inbox that is unread is either requiring of action on it, or unread.
    - organsnyder 12y ago
      The problem I have when I've used that strategy is that then I need to skim all of the emails and recall the state of each one. I find it to be both distracting and stressful—I'm reminded of every task I need to accomplish (or, at least, the most recent 20) whenever I check my email. For my work email, I try to practice inbox-0. Every message either gets an immediate action, or it's filed away as a task on my todo list (including the URL for the message in Gmail), and then archived.

gk1 12y ago

I set aside time every Monday for getting to "inbox zero." That's when I go through every email in my inbox -- including those I've let linger for the past week -- and do one of the following: - If it requires a task and I can do it within 2 minutes, then I just do it. - If it requires a task that'll take more than 2 minutes, I schedule the task on my calendar and archive the email. - If it's just for future reference (eg, flight confirmation), I add an appropriate label ("Travel") and archive it. - If it's none of the above, then it either gets archived or just deleted. So I don't have the problem that Inbox is trying to solve. What I'm wondering is will this eventually be forced onto all users, whether we need it or not?

sprokolopolis 12y ago
The video on the blog post says that it is separate from Gmail and that you are welcome to use both. I assume they plan on keeping it that way.

sz4kerto 12y ago

I have tried all kinds of intelligent note taking apps, GMail workflows, and so on. At the moment I think that the Unix philosophy works here as well: I use simple but working tools and I build my workflow on/with them instead of using a complex, big app/infrastructure that tries to find out what I'm interested in. So I'm stuck with an email provider that follows standards, and I feel good about being able to move to another provider, etc. in case I want to do so. In most cases, I know what I want, and I am OK with opening the app that can do the job for me. However, I want that app work properly and always. That's why I don't find Google Now too appealing: I don't want a personal assistant who tries to figure out what I want. I want a personal assistant that can do what I want when I ask for it. I don't need an app that scrapes my email for airline tickets -- I need an app that makes me easy to look up delays and departure times. I don't want an app that sets an alarm clock automatically when I have a meeting because there are two cases: 1) I need an alarm, but then I need to be 100% sure that it's set (and I don't want to double check whether magical AI figured it out properly) 2) I don't need an alarm (so I don't want my personal assistant to set up one). I cannot risk missing somethink: if it's not important, I'll try to unsubscribe. But that's only my use case. Ah, and +1: I don't want to keep emails. If I don't want to retain some information, then I just delete it -- there's no search algorithm in sight thats accuracy is independent of the search space. More emails, items -> less effective search.

lordbusiness 12y ago

I too consider email to be a perfectly working system and I have achieved "inbox 0" since I started using email in 1994. IBM drilled it into me that my inbox wasn't meant to be a 'pending' queue, and as such I should action items or clear them out. That and some general common sense has added up to me being bewildered when people discuss how difficult email is. I really hope that doesn't come off as snarky, because it's not meant to be! :-)

Rezo 12y ago

I wouldn't say I have a problem with email as it is today, but I am the exact opposite of you; I never archive or organize any of my email (besides rules for labeling email lists and groups so they directly bypass my inbox). I appear to have 11,600+ emails in my Gmail inbox. If I need something, I just search for it. As the Gmail search is really, really, good, I can pretty much instantly bring up any thread. I therefore don't see any value in spending even a second of time in trying to organize a piece of email. I also really like the "Social" and "Promotions" tabs Gmail added, it's like a smart filter for "unimportant stuff" that I don't even need to bother looking at but can search for if needed. I look forward to Inbox automating and highlighting actionable items even more (check in for flight etc, should just be a button press without even opening the email). I would rather apply a label, or mark a message as unread (this is what I typically do), if it is something I need to return to later. Most emails can either be directly acted upon, or don't require a followup at a later time, so optimizing the common case down to "do nothing" makes sense for me.

smacktoward 12y ago
I do the same thing, only in Thunderbird over IMAP with around 27,000 messages. TB search is fast and accurate, and I keep track of emails that need immediate action by starring them and then un-starring them after the action is taken. Pretty straightforward.
ricket 12y ago
I think you have to really consciously process your email though, in order for your system to work. I have gotten really bad at email lately and it's because of this: I leave my emails in my inbox like you. Except I archive something that I'm really, truly done with (never wanna see it again, not even for reference; archive = trash). But now my inbox is a mix of things I haven't yet read, I've read but haven't acted on, things I've read and keep in my inbox for reference, and things that I'm done with but I'm ignoring them so hard that they never actually get archived like they should. "Mark as unread" is used at a whim, usually when I read something on my phone and think "I should read this on my computer" so I flag it unread to make sure it stands out. Nothing is starred, except I have colored stars and mark a bill with a green star before I archive it (this is a remnant of a system I tried in the past but didn't fully stick). As a result, I end up missing or not doing things, and re-reading emails I've already done, and my inbox is just a big chronologically-ordered mess. This is my personal email anyway. My work email I'm a little more careful with, but it also piles up over time and rarely something will slip through the cracks. Outlook's flag/reminder system is decent at least, so it's manageable, but it still at times feels disorganized and just not quite how I want it to be.

timfrietas 12y ago

I also use inbox zero, but it took me 15 years to get to that point. That's quite a learning curve, and not built into email at all--it's something you have to discover outside of Gmail or any other email client. Combine that with the fact that the most recent generation is using email less and less, and products built around email are bound to evolve in order to remain relevant.

kin 12y ago

I also do inbox 0 the exact same way you do but sometimes it's not enough. For example, if an online retailer sends me promotions I don't care about, I'd like them to be auto-archived for when I actually feel like buying something, but I don't want to miss my purchase confirmations. Google's new categories help and Inbox sounds promising but I feel like there's too much assumption going on in parsing the emails. Really, I'd like email addresses to be on the domain level. For example, mail@cool_username.gmail.com and flights@cool_username.gmail.com. Then, give me granular control over how "mail" or "flights" get categorized and give me nested categories.

puls 12y ago
Check out plus addressing! Not part of any standard, but supported by Gmail and many other email providers. http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-your.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-m...
- kin 12y ago
  I've tried plus addressing. Some websites annoyingly don't accept them :(
- sib 12y ago
  The plus sign has been a valid character in email addresses since 1982 (RFC 822). See page 8: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc822.html http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc822.html
nicwolff 12y ago
I filter all messages with the word "unsubscribe" in the body into a "Bulk Mail" folder that I check once a week, works beautifully. As for the per-category addressing, you can add "+flights" to your username when subscribing to flight notifications and then filter on that however you like...
enobrev 12y ago
I've been wanting something similar, but in the form of automated expiration after a certain amount of time (able to set "expiration" to either "Archive" or "Trash" in said rule). For example, I'd love to be able to add a rule so that certain "deal" emails (those to which I'm purposely subscribed) to expire after say 1 day or 1 week - whatever the standard time for the sender's deals to typically last. Then on the occasion that I end up in the woods, whether literally or figuratively, and unable to maintain my email for a couple days, I don't end up with an overwhelming and generally self-perpetuating inbox debt

wink 12y ago

I seem to be the only person in the world whose email is only broken since forced to use GMail on a work account (and Thunderbird totally fails at using the IMAP thing). I mean, searching for "vpn" doesn't give me the mail that contains "openvpn"? Or it's that incompatible to my workflow that not even RTFM works...

zorbo 12y ago
Search is hilariously bad in all email clients, including gmail. Google managed to solve searching on the web by just throwing enough information in it until you kinda always got what you wanted to know. But that doesn't work for email, because there just isn't more info to throw at it than what's in your mailbox. You need to actually have decent search algorithms. And those are apparently too difficult to write, since not a single mail client out there does it right. Grep does a better job.
- petepete 12y ago
  Not all email clients. http://notmuchmail.org/ http://notmuchmail.org/
  - ams6110 12y ago
    Thanks for mentioning that. I use notmuch and the emacs mode for my email. It's absolutely the best email experience I've ever had.
aiiane 12y ago
I bet I could find plenty of people that would consider search to be broken if searching for vpn did return openvpn results. (Or the slightly less loaded example, if searching for 'man' returned results with 'almanac'.)

rip747 12y ago

I'm with you. currently i have 3 emails in my inbox. the rest are archived. Like 85% of the population, my inbox is a todo list not a social engagement.

Chris911 12y ago

Exact same flow here.

Tehnix 12y ago

Have you considered using Mailbox[0]? I also do the Inbox Zero thing, and absolutely love the overview it gives me of what I need to do. With Mailbox, you'll "snooze" mails and it'll be like they get delivered to you at the later specified time. I recently sat my parents down, installed mailbox on their devices, and instructed them how to use the app. Amazingly enough, they now constantly use it, and aim for the zero inbox (they are people that would have to write down what ctrl-c does, and didn't know about ctrl-z...). [0] http://www.mailboxapp.com http://www.mailboxapp.com EDIT: If it wasn't clear; I'm also very satisfied my with mail flow :)

k-mcgrady 12y ago
I liked Mailbox but Dropbox own it and I'm more and more concerned about how they handle my privacy. Add to that that for Mailbox to work your emails have to be stored on their servers (AFAIK, please tell me if I'm wrong) I switched away.
- Tehnix 12y ago
  Only the snoozed mails are stored until they are redelivered, as far as I can tell, but I can see your point. I personally don't care that much about privacy, if the convenience gains are high enough :) "Mailbox stores a subset of your emails temporarily in order to redeliver snoozed emails, provide fast delivery and provide push notifications. We encrypt all communication to and from the Mailbox app, and all information cached on our servers is stored in an encrypted format." [0] [0] http://www.mailboxapp.com/help/#/search?query=mailbox%20store http://www.mailboxapp.com/help/#/search?query=mailbox%20stor...
- frogpelt 12y ago
  How much less trustworthy is Dropbox than Google?
  - k-mcgrady 12y ago
    Google already has my emails (Gmail). If I use Mailbox I'm throwing another party into the mix. Google continues to get them and now Dropbox gets some of them too. It would be best to use the service of the company that gets them either way (Google). Why give your email to two companies when you can give them to one and get the same features?

epalm 12y ago

To those who think inbox-0 is a waste of time, because you can just search for email, so why spend even a second organizing it: what causes you to remember to reply to an email sent to you 3 days ago, which is now the 119th email in your inbox? I subscribe to inbox-0 because emails in my inbox need attention of some kind. I'm not advocating spending an inordinate amount of time organizing every email with labels and filters. Just "inbox == needs attention, not-inbox == I can safely forget about it".

mncolinlee 12y ago
Honestly, the workaround I always used for this is starring the e-mail or Boomerang it if it's really important. Also, mailing lists and social coupons get filtered immediately. Boomerang is pretty similar to some features of Inbox.
hrktb 12y ago
I receive hundreds of useless mails everyday (not filterable spam, just thing I don't care about or have no valuable information), so dealing with each of them to empty the inbox is a waste of time. Most mail that matters come from specific people (close family, project members, current client...) so it's easy to search, the unexpected important mails and things that needs to be done later just need to be starred. I feel it's really efficient when the signal/noise ratio is very low.
- mytochar 12y ago
  It sounds like you're doing an adaptation of Inbox Zero anyway. It's Inbox-Starred rather than Inbox Zero, which to me sounds like what someone would do if their email didn't have an archive option. Or for people that generally don't like archival. Personally, I didn't like archival at first, but now I'm quite addicted to it Full Disclosure: I'm a Inbox Zero-er.

_greim_ 12y ago

You're not satisfied with email itself, you're satisfied with your filtering software, plus your rigorous discipline, plus email. I don't think email is necessarily broken, so much as woefully incomplete for the kinds of tasks it's typically used for.

perlpimp 12y ago

same here. there was a while ago article about usefulness of these manual organizer interfaces. they just don't work. what works is a system that can infer what you need to do from what you have done before give you maximum shortcut value. Example was presented - in facebook if you enter school you've been to you can post messages to these people - to field gets macro selector for your friends that have attended same school you did. usually if I can't remember something - i usually don't really need to do that. I will definetly won't engage in this pseudo work. Also how does this pass 20/80 test? Well good on google. this sort of reminds me buzz they had. but I haven't played with this yet.

ajhit406 12y ago

I'm also an inbox-zero practitioner and am fully satisfied with my current email workflow with one caveat -- for "waiting on" or "not relevant now" emails, I need a way to bring them back to my inbox at some estimated time in the future to be revisited. I found Boomerang (http://www.boomeranggmail.com/ http://www.boomeranggmail.com/) a year ago, and it's been amazing for keeping inbox-zero (and my sanity). I average about 300 emails a day and most of them aren't immediately relevant. I then label them with their context(s) and boomerang them when I think they'll be actionable. It's an amazing workflow, and I honestly think Google could just offer some type of "resend me this email later" (maybe even with a small note to myself) and would solve 90% of people's workflow problems.

anarchitect 12y ago
Fully agree with this. Boomerang has really been the only way my inbox has remained exclusively actionable items that are not blocked by waiting for people to reply. I haven't seen Inbox yet, but it sounds like the "snooze" feature might solve this problem for many people.

lifeformed 12y ago

Only a few hundred emails a day? How do you get any work done?! I get a few dozen and it's a huge distraction.

VLM 12y ago
I can provide a personal example, I work at a place where we have one and only one ticketing / bug tracking system, but it can't be used for ticketing / bug tracking because its only to be used in hyper procedural, formalized manner solely to generate numerical metrics. All actual ticket tracking / bug tracking work is organized manually by each individual in email. Not entirely unlike how most corporations use Excel as their corporate standard database, although excel isn't technically a database. So email is not a ticketing system, but for us, it is. A few hundred emails is not terribly unusual per day. Filtering strategies are vital. Topic drift away from the subject line is strongly discouraged. This is at one of the largest companies in the world.

SonicSoul 12y ago

inbox-0 or not, it is still very helpful to use the multiple inbox feature in gmail [0], I've separated mine into "inbox", "follow up", "upcoming events", "to read". this way the screen is utilized better and i can actually see agenda.. also archive them after moving so that inbox only has items that still need attention.. Most people probably don't realize the cognitive effort they waste on re-parsing the same messages in inbox over and over and over again. I also tried to engineer a sort of self-destruction messages. The kind that are relevant for a day or few but don't need to be kept. I added the rules to mark those as "disposable" and once in a while i just nuke them from my inbox. This is still a manual step so it would be nice if something like a self destructive message label was invented in case el Goog is watching this [0] http://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-to-use-gmail-more http://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-t...

LocalPCGuy 12y ago
I love Multiple Inbox for work emails, although for home I don't. My work email tends to get a bit cluttered during a project, but I try to get back to Inbox 0 when I get a moment to go through things. My Multiple Inboxes are: Unread Inbox, Starred, Action/WaitingOn labels, Drafts and Unread (non-inbox). I had to add the last one as I was missing emails I hadn't read but had setup filters for. This deprioritizes them, but I still see them, and I can easily just mark them as read as they generally don't require much attention. The other tip I'd say is learning the basics of keyboard shortcuts - I can open, assess and archive/delete an email very quickly because I use e/# (archive/delete respectively). I can burn through the unimportant emails very quickly that way.

tomkarlo 12y ago

I'm an inbox-zero-er (and Googler) and I love using Inbox for that exact reason - it makes it even easier for me to deal quickly with emails I don't want to touch (e.g. promotional), and snooze emails I can't act on immediately so they'll come back next week or whenever I need to follow up on them. That means I can have an even more focused inbox that just contains things I need to think about / respond to right now. In comparison, I still use regular gmail for my work email and I have maybe a dozen emails sitting in there that I don't need to do anything about right now but need to follow up on soon. IMHO, Inbox basically takes the stuff that inbox-zero folks had to learn to do manually, and makes a lot of it automated. It's particularly great on mobile.

mbesto 12y ago
> IMHO, Inbox basically takes the stuff that inbox-zero folks had to learn to do manually, and makes a lot of it automated. It's particularly great on mobile. But the manual intervention is precisely what makes my zero-inbox so effective. It's also agnostic to the device/application. If I leave something unread on a device it's unread somewhere else and vice versa. If one calls it "save for later", I don't know if that also means "unread".
- tomkarlo 12y ago
  Why does manual intervention (per se) make your zero-inbox so effective? This isn't somehow magically processing emails for you, it's just automating how those emails are handled after you decide what to do with them. IIRC inbox-zero says you should file all of those to a "next week" or "next month" category and then once a week go through that inbox. This effectively removes the need to do that chore, because you can just say "put this back in front of me a week/month from now." I don't see why this is any less "device agnostic" than any other method. You can use Inbox on mobile or desktop and they stay in sync; in fact, you can use Inbox on mobile and traditional Gmail on desktop (or vice-versa) and they'll stay in sync as well. (And you do in fact konw if the email is unread or not, since that's a separate bit of status info. You can snooze an email without reading it.)

veidr 12y ago

Nope you are not alone. IMAP (despite being a technical mess behind the scenes) is my favorite computer technology of all time and has benefitted my life immensely. I would rather have today's email and no modern web than the reverse. I don't do inbox zero, I do inbox 50k. I just let mail pile up--why not? It only stresses you out if you let it (I don't). Even with a million messages, it's instantly searchable with any decent mail client--and since it is standard IMAP you can use a bunch of different clients just like you use 3-4 different web browsers at the same time. I have automated filters for stuff like Amazon that's key to my daily life but that I don't usually want to actually see, and the only manual organization I do is annual: I have folders like 2013, 2012, etc back to 1994 (containing all mail in and out). This started because in the old days clients bogged down with more than 20,000 or so messages in one folder. That's mostly not the case these days, but I like the yearly organization, and organizing my correspondence once a year isn't really too annoying, so I continue to do it this way. I have routed all my faxes and voicemail to my email for 15+ years, too. And it works on every device I own. For years and years and years. I think email is about as perfect as computer tech ever gets. Usually instant (but tolerant of a multi-day outage), completely standard and future-proof data, that works on virtually every device and platform currently in use. Email needs to be disrupted about as much as the hammer needs to be disrupted.

pearjuice 12y ago
You read your email once a year? Did I miss something?
- veidr 12y ago
  Indeed, you did. I read my email whenever I want. I spend time manually moving/filing/archiving my email about once a year.
  - andygates 12y ago
    "Select all last-year mail, archive. Done." :)
DanielBMarkham 12y ago

sytelus 12y ago

Emails have several issues: Large % of emails are newsletters, notifications, offers and promotions. This is not spam (I think we have got that under control). These are the things you intentionally subscribed to and "nice to know" but not important or urgent. Email clients are utterly oblivious to identifieng and ranking them (Gmail's Priority Inbox is rather dumb baby steps). Replying to threads and quoting previous replies is a pain. Threads become too long with several different colored highlights all over. There is no easy way to control your membership in email conversation. It's hard to get out and hard to get in. Creating groups is high friction. Sharing previous conversations with someone or a group is non-practical. Most email clients rank emails using date time. You can say that 70% of the human generated content uses perhaps most naive ranking algorithm. It is mind boggling that we still don't use signals like age of conversation, length, participants, topic, embedded action items etc. Even in 2014, most email clients will happily push email sent at 9AM for your house on fire after the benign Groupon promotion sent on 10 AM. Emails are free form and there are poorly defined standards standards to add structured data such as reminders and action items for recipients, auto-expiration, callback number etc. You can't share your "like" or upvote/downvotes for emails sent to a group. This severally limits how much social expression can be attached to emails flowing within a group.

taeric 12y ago
This doesn't really make it not spam. After a while, I do have to wonder why quite a few of my emails aren't just items in an RSS feed.

dmourati 12y ago

Same. I had an inbox zero policy before that was a thing. It's the only sane way to deal with email. Count today: ~100 work emails. Most take less than a second of time. Some, require <1 minute to reply. The outliers are the ones that require me to do actual work beyond email but those are luckily usually communicated otherwise.

aeze 12y ago

I don't have a problem with my e-mail workflow, it took a while and much effort to get to that point though.

72deluxe 12y ago

I don't find email broken (I use gmail). I typically have multiple emails in the inbox ready to be 'worked on' if they're unread. If they're read, I've done something with them (and it stops my phone flashing at me constantly). Then, at the end of every month I fetch all mail via POP3 and delete all emails from my inbox. The same goes for my phone (I use SMSBackup+ on Android). But I still have my "offline" archive of data on my laptop, which I then backup once a month too. (Thanks TimeMachine).