The trouble with being a young writer (and I know I must be young as everyone keeps remarking on how David Tennant is "too young" to be the Doctor and he's the same age as me) is a lot of your work lives in your mail client. This can be handy for filing things but can also start to be a problem when you have "too much stuff" and a haphazard filing system which has organically grown as your work has done. In a perfect world, I would have a planned tag system and would methodically file each key email as required. Such things may exist but the trouble is moving from an existing system to a new system. Gradully the inboxes and folders fill, spill and get impossible to manage. They lurk on the PC with the promise of days of time-wasting "sorting my email out"; one of those tedious jobs which looks so appealing when you know you have more important things to do. A revision timetable of make-work.

I took a baby step forward today by loading Thunderbird, the sister application to Firefox (in some strange mythological genus in which an avian is a sister to a ...foxes are technically in the dog family, right?). I'd been avoiding doing anything about the elephantine email graveyard until I was sure Warring States wasn't coming back to bite me on the arse. Once I was sure I wouldn't lose years of messages from editors and the like first, I went for it with Thunderbird. It needs to be 'trained' right now, and I'm rebuilding the 'filters' (the equivilent of 'rules' under OE) from scratch as emails come in using a planned, expandable structure. But what really intrigues me is the option to save searches i.e. do a search to filter messages across the different folders and then retain those results. If this works as I think it does, then I'll be able to find emails for different projects much faster and in a maintainable manner. Cool.

And, even after importing my old mail (which took less time than I expected), the client runs so much faster than poor old OE...




Look! Look! I didn't mention Doctor Who once...well, apart from that bit about Tennant but I don't think anyone noticed...oh bugger...