I archive everything by time. It’s the most obvious search parameter, and often the most easy to remember to narrow down whatever you are looking for to a small number of items.

Put another way – narrow down what you are looking for using time, then just brute force it. The overall effort is significantly less, even if on occasion this method has a bad outcome or two.

In the real world – I use this method for all kinds of things. I never pay bills on time since nearly all providers are polite and will remind you to pay – that gets rid of half the junk right there. Only the really important stuff bubbles up. So right up front my typical strategy is to file into a huge unsorted queue. Out of the incoming barrage, I pick the important stuff and deal with it of course.

In the virtual world I file email much the same way. Every three months or so I dump my oldest emails into the current year archive broken down by quarter. At the end of the year, I have a full year archive in 4 neat archives.

Any “searching” is easily accomplished by picking the right archive and then either doing a text search or rummaging around. You’d be surprise how little any one particular conversation crosses the quarter boundary, and simultaneously how little time it takes to rifle through three months of email. Narrowing down to a 3 month window isn’t usually that hard either, and if you miss, you pick the guess +1 or -1. That’s a 9 mo. window, which is pretty big.

This used to be a pain, but something like the Fujitsu ScanSnap makes it…uh…snap. :-)