I’m a packrat, so I tend to keep anything other than spam or things that I consider to be insignificant. My setup:

The inbox is for mail that just came in and for mail that needs my attention in some way, so there’s usually one or two things hanging around in it. I color code the headers so that I can tell at a glance what needs to be done with any messages in there.

I’ve created a series of folders like Miscellaneous, People, Work, etc. for archiving mail into. Each of these has sub-folders for more specific filing. The Miscellaneous category contains things like newsletters, mails that I haven’t figured out a category for, and anything I’m a member of (like forums or Launchpad or whatever).

Anything that can be filed elsewhere (like in a note keeper or as part of a project relating to the contents of the email) gets moved as soon as possible. Once it’s moved, the email is deleted.

I don’t trust a spam filter to do the cleaning for me, so I quickly go through headers and mark messages for removal, checking the contents of the one or two I’m unsure of first. If you do this regularly, you get pretty good at spotting the trash. (:

One thing I do that you don’t mention doing is that I sometimes peruse my archives to weed out things I archived with the thought that they might come in handy some day, only to realize later that I really won’t need them. It’s kind of similar to how we keep clothing or personal items, and every so often we take stock of what we own and get rid of some of it, because we realize we’ll never use it.

The variety of responses you’ve gotten on this are wonderful. I always enjoy finding out how and why others do things. (:

But then again, I’m not an email centered person like some (you) are. Even if I do mail, I do it mostly in IM style.

In terms of search, it turns out (for me) that sorting by date (newest to oldest) gives pretty good results.

The big reason is I want my inbox to be clean. If I search my archives because I look for something, I don’t want to need to search through gigs and gigs of junk. Because unnecessary mails are just that for me.
Done is done, I don’t care about passed events and writings that are online anyway (that is, not personal for me).

This is my thought, but of course I can see your point aswell.

I wouldn’t want to use desktop search on your computer either :) I can imagine the huge list which would not be useful at all…

Peter

On the other hand I tend to delete things like ‘confirm your account link’, XYZ has added you to your contact list and all the other notifications which are of a informative character and not a conversation.

I quite a few filter rules in Evolution, fetch my mail with POP and archive all in gmail as well.

In Evolution I have archive folders and other subfolders. I try to keep the inbox clean in a GTD way.