Every once in a while people ask me about my email routine, so I thought I’d write about it here.
Everything I do starts with the philosophy that work and project email is a task queue. Therefore an email is a to-do list item someone else has assigned to me.
Ugh, how horrible! Better get that stuff done or rejected as soon as possible so I can move on to the stuff I want to do.
This means my target is inbox zero; achieving it means I got all my tasks done. Like everyone, I don’t always achieve it, but zero is the goal. How do I work towards it?
#0: Separate KDE and non-KDE emails
When I’m not in KDE mode, I want to be able to turn that stuff off in my own brain. To accomplish this, I have a home email account and a KDE email account. I adjust all my KDE accounts to only send email to my KDE address.
#1: Use an email client app
To manage multiple email accounts without going insane, I avoid webmail. In addition to not supporting multi-account workflows, it’s usually slow, lacking useful features, and has poor keyboard navigation.
I currently use Thunderbird, but I’m investigating moving to KDE’s KMail. Regardless, it has to be a desktop email client that offers mail rules.
#2: Automatic categorization (0 minutes)
I configure my email client with mail rules to automatically tag emails with colored labels according to what they are, and then mark them as read:
This results in almost all newly-arrived emails becoming colored and marked as read:
When I get a new kind of automated email that didn’t automatically receive a color label, I adjust the rules to match that new email so it gets categorized in the future, too.
#3: Manual categorization (1-3 minutes)
When I first open my email client in the morning, everything will be categorized except 5-15 emails sent by actual people. To see just these, I’ll filter the inbox by unread status, since all the auto-categorized colored emails got automatically marked as read.
Then it’s time to figure out what to do with them. For anything that needs a response or action today, I mark it as urgent by hitting the “1” key. For anything that needs a personal response in the next few days, I hit “9” to tag it as personal and it becomes green. And so on.
Any emails that don’t need a response get immediately deleted. I never miss them. It’s fast and painless. Put those emails out of their misery.
#4: Action all the urgent emails (5-15 minutes)
Urgent means urgent; first I’ll go through these one at a time, and action them somehow. This means one of the following:
- If it’s from a person, write a reply and then delete the email.
- If it’s from an automated system, open the link to the thing it’s about in a web browser and then delete the email.
The email always ends up deleted! For people like us emails are not historical records, they’re tasks. Do you need to remember what tasks you performed 8 years ago on Tuesday, May 11th? Of course not. Don’t be a digital hoarder; delete your emails. You won’t miss them.
At this point I may realize that I was overzealous in tagging something as urgent. That’s fine; I just re-tag it as something else, and then I’ll get to it later.
#5: Action all the merge request emails (5-10 minutes)
Since my day job is “quality assurance manager”, these are important. I’ll go through every automated email from invent.kde.org about merge requests for repos I’m subscribed to and action them somehow:
- Open the link to the merge request in my web browser, and then delete the email.
- Decide I don’t need to review this particular merge request, and just delete the email.
More deletion! I never keep these emails around; they’re temporal notifications of other people’s work. Nothing worth preserving.
#6: Action all the bug report emails (5-15 minutes)
My web browser is now filled up with tabs for merge requests to review. Now it’s time to do that for relevant bug reports. I follow the same process here: open the bug report in my web browser because it needs a comment or other action from me, and then delete the email — or else immediately delete the email because it’s not directly actionable. Delete, delete, delete. It’s the happiest word when it comes to email. Everyone hates emails; delete them! Show them you mean business.
#7: Do actual work
At this point I’ve spent between 15 and 40 minutes just on email, ugh. Time to do some actual work! So now I’ll spend the next several hours going through those tabs in my web browser, from left to right. First reviewing merge requests, then handling the relevant bug reports (closing, re-opening, replying to comments, changing metadata, marking as duplicate, CCing others, etc). During this step, I’ll also triage the day’s new bug reports.
Sometimes I’ll check email again while doing these, since more will be coming in. It’s easy to delete or action them individually.
After all these tabs are closed, hooray! I have some time to be proactive instead of reactive! Usually this amounts to 0-120 minutes a day during working hours. I try to spend this time on fixing small bugs I found throughout the day, opening and participating in discussion topics about important matters, working on the KDE HIG, and sometimes helping people out on http://www.discuss.kde.org or http://www.reddit.com/r/KDE.
#8: Action all the rest of the emails (10-25 minutes)
Towards the end of the day I’ll look at the emails marked as “Personal” and “KDE e.V./Akademy” and try to knock a few out. It’s okay if I’m too tired; these aren’t urgent and can wait until tomorrow. After a few days of sitting there, I’ll mark them as urgent.
And that’s pretty much it! This is just my workflow; it doesn’t need to be yours. But in case you want to try it, here are answers to some anticipated objections:
Ugh, that sounds like it takes forever!
It really doesn’t.
On a Monday maybe it takes more like 35 or 40 minutes since there are emails from the weekend to process. But on Tuesday through Friday, it’s closer to 15-20 minutes. Often 10 on Friday. Thanks to the automatic categorization, all of this is much faster than manually looking at every email one by one, and much more effective than getting depressed by hundreds of unread emails in the morning and ignoring them.
Deleting emails is too scary, what if I need them in the future?
You won’t.
But if that’s too scary or painful, set up your email account or client app to archive “deleted” messages in permanent storage rather than truly deleting them. Just keep in mind that you’ll eventually run out of storage space and have to deal with that problem in the future. Once it happens, consider it an opportunity to reconsider, asking yourself how many emails you actually did need to dig out of cold storage. I’m guessing the number will be very low, maybe even 0.
This might work for your workflow, but I get different types of emails!
Maybe so, but the general principle of automatically tagging (but not moving) emails applies to anyone. I firmly believe that anyone can benefit from this part. Make the software do the grunt work for you!
What do I do about all of those the old emails in my inbox? There are too many, I’ll never get through them!
If you’re one of those people who has 50,000 emails in your inbox, select all and delete. You won’t miss any of them.
Seriously. All of them. Every single one. Right now. Just do it.
How do I know this is fine?
- Old notifications about things like bug reports or merge requests are worthless because they already happened. Delete.
- Old mailing list conversations long since dried up or got actioned without your input. Delete.
- Old at-the-time urgent emails from important people are no longer relevant, because the people who sent them long ago concluded that you’re unreliable and decided to not contact you again. Because that’s what happens when you let emails pile up: you’re being rude to all the people whose messages you’ve ignored. Feel sad, resolve to do better, then delete.
The good news is that you can get better at this anytime, but it’s almost impossible without making a clean break with a messy past. You’ll be looking at old stuff forever and won’t have time for new stuff.
I just get too much email, it’s impossible to keep up no matter what I do!
You need to unsubscribe from some things. Maybe a lot of things. Longtime contributors to any project will have accumulated years worth of subscriptions to sources of emails that are no longer relevant. Prune them!
This may trigger Fear Of Missing Out. Recognize that and fight against it. You can almost always reduce your email load by unsubscribing from this stuff:
- Activity in Git repos for projects you no longer contribute to.
- Bug reports for products you aren’t involved in or responsible for anymore.
- Medium to high traffic mailing lists that are mostly or entirely irrelevant to your present interests and activities.
- Almost all the spam from LinkedIn.
- All the spam from online stores, newspapers, political campaigns. The “unsubscribe” button will work, don’t give up!
Resist the temptation to filter these emails into folders that you tell yourself you’ll remember to look at once in a while. You probably won’t, and by the time you do, everything in them won’t be actionable anymore — if it ever was in the first place. Unsubscribe and delete!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
It’s a little symptomatic that the main representative of the KDE out the uses Thunderbird instead of KMail ;).
I tried to switch to KMail (and the whole Kontact suite) a couple times (both in KDE 4 and 5), but something bigger or smaller always broke… Usually related to Akonadi if I recall correctly. It’s a pity, Kontact’s UI appeals to me (even though some may find it overcomplicated).
If only we could use it without Akonadi :)…
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Not a little, but totally symptomatic.
I have also tried using KMail several times. But also always have something that starts bothering me, to the point I quit. One of the worst of the things, if I remember well (maybe it works well nowadays) is that you had to choose between eagerly downloading all your email (sorry, I don’t delete old emails), in this case it takes forever downloading and uses a lot of storage, or to only fetch messages when you click on them (which is slow when you have a lot of emails to peek). I wish it would have some setting to automatically delete local copies of emails older than x days and automatically fetch newer emails.
To be honest, nowadays all my emails accounts are hosted on GMail (either personal or work via Google Workspace). And the ‘important’ tagging helps me most of the time.
I’m considering giving KMail another try, but let’s see. I wish it could have a simpler interface and sort that nasty use case..
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Akonadi is the backbone of all KDE personal info management (emails, to-dos, contacts, calendars etc) and its main selling point is its sheer ease of use for app developers (as i understand it). It crashes and spews errors left and right (when i use it in Mercuro kde calendar), but it too easy for devs to use and everyone in kde rely on it and its interfaces. So as meme is saying:
“you can’t just rewrite the akonadi” 🤣
It is a pity tho, because at the end of the day PIM software (just like a multiplayer videogame) can only be as good as its netcode/backend.
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That’s why I hope that one of the next KDE goals will be “KDE in business” or similar. Fixing KDE PIM, especially Akonadi reliability would be a huge benefit.
Because Akonadi will break sooner or later during your use. I re-started using it multiple times from scratch, switched to SQLite (after I deleted GBs of unused data from MySQL which shouldn’t have been there since I had removed all providers), but still, it’s just lost the ability to display all my calendar events and started storing newly created ones out of their place (Bug 489654).
All in all, I really hope it gets some focus in the near future because the potential is there, but it doesn’t really accomplish to be a reliable, day-to-day help allowing to focus on work uninterrupted.
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I was using Kontact and KMail for over a decade, but stopped about 5 years ago. I really liked it’s interface, it is a typical win2k era poweruser app. For a long time I stayed on the KDE 3.5 version, because it was absolutely stable, fast, and could manage a lot of email. I had about 10 accounts at the same time, I almost exclusivly used it by keyboard.
But slowly things were not working smoothly anymore. After Akonadi, I randomly lost emails (thankfully never really lost, they just disappeared from my inboxes) and it was slow. I finally gave up on it, when I took a job, that requires me to use windows. Thankfully I can choose my own email client and I hate Outlook. So Thunderbird was the natural choice. I now also use it on my Linux machines, so I can have the same interface everywhere. Thunderbird also offers great add-ons. I daily use “Cardbook”, “Auto Address Cleaner”, “Expression Search – NG”, “Siganture Switch” and “Thunderbird Conversations”.
Conversations is especially great, as it displays your interactions with other people as continous thread, including your answers. In an ideal world, everyone would use interleaved style and trim as much as possible, but most people are top posters (thank you Outlook and GMail) or just don’t quote anything at all. With conversations I get a nice, well, conversation.
Then Cardbook is great for CardDAV contacts, better than the included address book. And “Expression Search – NG” lets me search my huge mail collection. Yes, I don’t delete everything. Storage is cheap. When in inbox gets too full, I download the old messages as monthly or yearly archive and save it as mbox on my nextcloud. Then I can still access it from different clients.
I basically missuse Thunderbird as document storage and archive, partly also because kde desktop search also never worked for me and I disabled it now as best as I could.
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Good article.
I came up with a similar system on my workspace (i am teacher). I have 2 corporate emails – one for university (studying for phd) and one for college (working as teacher)
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3 is the only reason I keep read emails to inbox archive. For work I’ve Google workspace account without storage limitation where important docs for future references/proof/audit are often shared over email.
I use webmail and Thunderbird interchangeably, some tasks are easier in the web interface of google.
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i use also a Thunderbird with a Tree-struckture of senders or let it in the head-root of Mails..
I have make out of the Thunderbird folder a portable with extract in an own folder and start it with -profile with an own baked Exe binary and runs as a Portable WinNT Programm where works in Wine and Winxp and Win7 also in VM’s … (so, exist in Linux a real Portable possibility..? / nope)
Deleting, i try to delete nothing and store the most of my Important mails, and if is grown to big, make a backup of this Portable Thunderbird, named it by date, from-upto and safe it on my Server, then if comes anything, can i extract this package and can exaxtly say what’s was in this Mail from xxxxx.. and be in able then to delete the extracted TB-from-to Folder again and have ever my actual mail Folder also .. so have i am also the whole stored thunderbird-folders from the last century 😉 As Portable.
but this works not in Linux for have some maximal variable Portable Binarys, because in mostly all Linux distros be the Depencies other.. ooor, the Linbrarys be aged and to old to be nomore existand..
because i have to take ever a VM for use my thunderbird so have i to take ever an Multi OS’es in a System, so via VM or by boot, also for gaming, because wine not so compatible how it should be.. on this place.. jeahhhh we have a Icon… and not jeeaahh we have a whole Icontheme, as compare … because it’s not look on a Whole way, more look on single steps and not a real target because there will it ever give a couples Peoples where shoot the Targets for killing it .. they make a fun for it .. and the bad’s, at moments because this problematic, what i see and noise on the internet, have all eveloped ,with the wrong assumption, to small steps where can be better steer …. 
because wine schould worked more better.. but what i see, by self of the shell32.dll fit’s the icons not to the orginal WinNT versions and be not compatible because i make not the work to try for make Wine compatible with extra DLL and exefile for work the most WinNT programms.. because Wine is not really compatible to a real WinNT system.. i experiment time by time with Wine and play araound.. but in the last 10 Years have it nothing really changed towards to a real compatibility of WinNT from MS ..
because this, i use a WinNT portable Thunderbird wheres able to ziping and store it, by time to time..
to have a backup…
best
Blacky
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Try to export archived email into mbox files, depending on the volume, either by month or year. Those mbox files you can add in thunderbird as extra mailboxes, then you can still access them through search and you can also reply to or copy the original email if you need that. The mbox you can save on your server or cloud storage. I used to save them on my webspace and access them throug ftp, but now I save them in my nextcloud storage, then I can also regularly backup them.
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interesting artikle
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oh, blacklistings..
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Inbox zero is also my goal.
I delete work e-mails because I have a similar workflow. For personal email I delete the vast majority of e-mails but I forever archive all the important stuff (basically only shop orders, bills, and e-mails I wrote to someone and their replies).
I find it incredible when someone has tens of thousands of unread e-mails in their inbox because there’s no way they’ll be able to find anything in there.
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What do you do if you browser crashes with all the tabs open?
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Happens all the time — in fact multiple times a day as a result of me restarting kwin_wayland to test stuff. I just re-launch it and it remembers all the open tabs. This is with Firefox.
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I also try for the “zero inbox” bliss (not there yet, though) but I don’t delete emails from people (almost never, some times I do) – I often find that I have to prove that I answered some how to some one, or that someone had told me something that caused me to act on some way.
So personal interactions that have been actioned get filed into categorized folders (by customer, project, responsibility, whatever) the categorization isn’t to help me find the thing later – search will always be faster – it is to help me understand search results in a glance.
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I like your system of color-tagging emails and marking them as read. I have had KMail just throw them into various folders but I think I like your method better.
I guess I’m one of those people who has stayed with KMail and its Akonadi backend through thick and thin. I will say that the 24.05 series is the best yet in terms of speed and data reliability. I’m looking forward to where the PIM developers are going to go next with it.
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That’s good to hear! I like tagging better because you can tag a message with multiple tags and adding and removing tags is really easy, but a message can’t be in more than one folder and moving, and duplicating it are more heavyweight operations.
I do keep meaning to try KMail again, but I am genuinely having trouble setting it up with my email accounts. I wonder if I’m just not smart enough to use it or something.
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Yes, good point, tags are more versatile.
Sorry to hear that you’re hitting a wall with KMail, and I’m sure you’re smart enough to get it going. It’s just fussy, that’s all.
Email setup works for me in KMail, but it’s only because I have done it so many times in the past and understand what it needs to get going. I don’t see it as different in any fundamental way from, say, Outlook or Thunderbird, except that they do some kind of autodetection magic that works out ports, protocols and servers. And once it knows the ports, protocols and servers, all that’s left is just your email address and password.
For me, I’ll just go to my email provider’s support page and find out what their IMAP details are and plug them into KMail’s account setup form.
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Ports and protocols are all fine for me, mostly. I’ve done this part many times. It seems to be, well, everything else, frankly! You can see at https://invent.kde.org/pim/kmail/-/issues/3
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Oof, that’s a terrible onboarding experience, but I’m glad that you documented it, thank you.
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I use Neon Unstable (daily) and must say that support for GMail in KMail is broken since February this year, at least the newest email I can see are coming from January this year. I mean I cannot neither receive nor send any email using gmail account. In result I have to use webemail. I have (only) 2 accounts so it is not so trrrible to manage them. Anyway I’m going to use (or actually back) to Thunderbird.
Of course bug is reported in https://bugs.kde.org/.
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Much like you, I also tried KMail many times, and, the latest, with KDE 5, I just couldn’t set it up and kept thinking “maybe I’m just not smart enough”.
As you mention wanting to give another try, I hope people with your sensibilities of UI/UX intuitiveness can make it more approachable to people like me.
I wish I could point to what I had issues with or how to improve it, you know, give proper feedback – but I lack the means to. Be it a lack of vocabulary or experience or technical knowledge or w/e, my feedback would be only the useless “I don’t get it”. So I apologise.
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I did give it another try FWIW, and ran into another host of “normal person” problems. I’m cataloging them at https://invent.kde.org/pim/kmail/-/issues/3.
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I like the idea to see an email as an assigned task. What do you do if a task/email need follow ups or more to do so that you cannot delete it right after replying? I tend to keep emails in my inbox to remind me that something is not finished yet, but this gets quickly messy. How would you handle that?
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In those cases I tend to keep the whole thread in my inbox until I consider is somehow fully resolved, and then at that point I’ll delete it. As I said, I aspire to inbox zero but don’t always achieve it, and this is one of the examples of that.
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